IPDPA: the Swi Army Knife of Intellectual Property Protection by John Boruvka

Your business relies on your intellectual property (IP) assets to remain competitive in the marketplace, so it's essential that you protect against theft and illegal use of your IP. Your company likely already has trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks, or patents in place, but sometimes you need more.

Enter IPDPA. What? IPDPA is Iron Mountain's acronym for an Intellectual Property Development Protection Agreement. If it's easier, you can just call it the Swiss Army knife of IP Protection - one tool with many uses.

Theft and illegal use of intellectual property is widespread and results in unrecovered costs and expensive legal battles. In fact, more than 9,000 IP cases were filed each year on average in the U.S. District Courts from 1994 to 2014. Litigation often revolves around the issue of when your idea is conceptualized and proof that you created it. Guess what? IPDPA can help with that.

What else can an IPDPA do?

Protect IP for start-ups

Third-party archiving of IP and know-how in litigation settlements

Benchmark the contribution of IP in joint ventures to establish each party's contribution

Strengthen the exit interview for key developers and putting competitors on notice

Provide the smoking gun if your IP is stolen or pirated

How does it protect your IP?

Here's how it works. You document your IP development with an audit trail that is securely held with Iron Mountain - a neutral third party. We date and time-stamp each instance of software source code or other proprietary information you deposit. When each new deposit is made, it is preserved along with prior deposits in a secure vault so that the integrity of older versions already in escrow is maintained. The incremental development of the intellectual property is substantiated and documented with a methodical audit trail. In this way, a genealogy of the product is kept on record with Iron Mountain, which can then confirm its legitimacy.

With this practical approach, an Iron Mountain IPDPA allows you to gain additional protection for your IP with a verifiable audit trail of IP development. Take that knife, can opener and scissors!

Learn more about how to Protect the Value of Your Intellectual Property in this executive summary, or download the complete white paper How to Safeguard Software and Technology Assets

Note: Swiss Army is a registered trademark of Victorinox AG, Ibach, Switzerland.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2015/service-lines/technology-escrow/ipd...
	See more stories from ironmountain

Most recent headlines