You can assume that it’s just a matter of time before your invention gets knocked off, says Portable Design Editor-in-Chief John Donovan. Here Donovan explores not only how to protect your products, but how, with caution and care, intellectual property can be both the value add and the future for the electronics industry.

The balancing act with intellectual property (IP) is building walls high enough to protect your inventions so that you can profit from them, while at the same time making those walls low enough to encourage the sharing of IP, enabling more and more creative products. Unfortunately, patent and copyright laws are enforced at the country level, whereas information is shared worldwide at the speed of light. With all of the brainpower available in countries that are less than stringent about enforcing patent and copyright laws, you can assume that it’s just a matter of time before your invention gets knocked off.

What can you do to protect yourself? You can either build the device you’ve invented and sell it yourself; or patent and license it to someone else to manufacture; or patent and cross-license it to a variety of vendors, who are then free to make products that incorporate patents from a variety of inventors such as yourself. In practice, American patent law tends to favor the former path and discourage the latter. This is unfortunate, since cross-licensing fosters collaborative innovation, whereas the “do it yourself” path favors larger firms and impedes the spread of innovation.

Of course, cross-licensing only works with companies that play by the rules. Almost all countries are members of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which sets the rules for international trade. When signing on, countries also sign on to more than 30 agreements, including the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which sets down minimum standards for IP protection, including patents, copyrights, and industrial and IC layout designs. TRIPS requires member states to institute strong IP protection, including automatic granting of copyrights to written works and software programs, rights that extend 50 years after the death of the author; it also aims to eliminate national preferences and exceptions regarding the granting of patents.

Enforcement varies from country to country, especially in those countries with either weak legal systems or cultures not accustomed to the concept that you can charge money for ideas. What’s needed is a global regime that protects against piracy of IP. The WTO and TRIPS provide much of that, and governments and companies have won a number of TRIPS suits. Enforcement activities have been reinforced by bilateral treaties between countries, as well as rules proposed to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the UN agency tasked with promoting the protection of IP while encouraging creative activity. WIPO manages international IP application and registration systems that rationalized once-conflicting national systems (“first to invent” versus “first to file”). Neither TRIPS nor WIPO are panaceas, but they are major steps in the right direction.

So what’s the best course of action once your patent is granted? Licensing is usually the best way to go, but only with partners whom you’ve vetted and with whom you have very clear agreements; this is one time when a good lawyer is not optional. Even then, the old motto “Trust and verify” still applies. If you’re not comfortable with licensing RTL to a particular partner, then license hard macros in GDSII. IP companies regularly do audits of their licensees and frequently find discrepancies, almost always because they’re a small cog in a very fast-moving wheel. Cross-licensing may increase your revenue streams, but it can also multiply your verification headaches, so consider your bandwidth when weighing the tradeoffs.

IP is both the value add and the future for electronics industry. With caution and care directed to IP protection, that future looks bright indeed.

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John Donovan is editor-in-chief of Portable Design, engineering resource for information and news on portable applications. Donovan has more than 24 years’ of industry experience in director-level roles at Silicon Valley companies such as MIPS and Cypress Semiconductor, as well as journalism experience in North America and Asia (on EDN Asia). For more, visit Portable Design magazine online.