How To Protect Your Digital Intellectual Property?

We live in an age where companies hold prime of their assets in the digital space. Despite being well exposed to the term intellectual property, we still wonder: what does it actually mean for a company, and how can we protect it?

To our surprise, not knowingly, every company has intangible assets often referred to as intellectual property. According to researchers and Ocean Tomo report, it is said that 87 percent of a company’s assets are intellectual property.

With such high reliance on intellectual property comes the need of securing and safeguarding a company’s assets. Prior to making the product live, tech companies often seek out legal protection such as patents and secured trademarks.

How do you protect intellectual property?

For tech companies, there are numerous forms of intellectual property:

• Copyrights
• Trademarks
• Trade secrets
• Patents

For a software product, intellectual property can be found in databases or embedded in the code. To safeguard the database most efficiently, you should identify two variables:

• What does your IP consist of?
• How is your IP protected legally?

Commonly practiced in the space of software development, three types of intellectual properties are widely talked about: copyrights, trade secrets, and patents.

What are the different categories of intellectual property and how do they relate to digital products?

A copyright is known to protect the solution or how an app serves the purpose, but there’s a limitation involved. Copyright can only protect the solution but not the idea behind it. It is best used when protecting source code, object code, and user interfaces.

A patent, whereas, protects the idea behind a particular solution or an app. Patents protect software architecture and proprietary algorithms. The process of getting a patent is painstaking, complex, and costly. Therefore, being an option is not possible for small-scale tech companies. Not only is costly, it does not secure the execution of the idea. In order to secure this, another form of protection is to be used.

Trade secrets hold proprietary information that a software development company discovers and works with. The pros of trade secrets allow a company to keep intact its processes for an indefinite time period until discovered by another company. A trade secret can only go public when a company of same nature practices the same ideation with the same process.

Cubix frequently faces the most common queries from clients regarding how to protect the source code, prevent the disclosure of ideas, and safeguard proprietary algorithms from third parties.

The core reason for focusing on of two types of legal protection of intellectual property (IP); copyright and trade secrets, is because they are most applicable to our clients’ needs in terms of IP protection.

How copyrights apply to source code and how to protect your source code.

There are two major aspects of protecting source code:

Source Code Ownership: Product owners have to make sure that source code is their intellectual property and not a developer’s.

Ensure Confidentiality: Product owners must ensure that they consider all the details about the technical side of their product confidential.

How does copyright protection apply to the source code? Creating source code is a creative process with a unique identity, meaning the result of such work can receive protection under copyright law. While many agree that creating source code involves a series of smaller tasks, they argue that smaller tasks do not receive protection by copyright.

How can you acquire copyright protection for your source code?

Being the first to market with an app or software program has never been more important. You alone should have the right to make money from the software you created from scratch. The Constitution protects copyright for a reason; it safeguards creative works of all kinds, including things the Founders couldn’t have imagined back then.

Copyright is the only sure way to protect your software creation. Technically speaking, under current copyright law, you automatically obtain a copyright when you write a piece of software, but practically speaking, having a copyright and proving it when you have to are two different concepts. If you go to court to protect yourself, you will have to be able to prove that you own it and also that you were the first one to write it.

In the United States, copyright law protects your software and every aspect of its creation, including all images and design elements. Copyright protection is valid for life. When you deposit your software for copyright, you cannot alter it, ensuring that a pristine copy of your software remains archived with officers who must retain all deposited documents. This process makes your copyright ownership incontestable, while the copyright holder can easily retrieve it at any time to establish ownership rights.

How do we protect your code at Cubix?

When it comes to legality, we follow a very transparent approach between both, the employees and our clients. We follow United States laws for legal protection, maintaining transparency and eliminating any chance of infringement.

When we use an engine to create an app, we fully disclose this to our clients and team, binding them with an NDA to maintain data transparency and avoid authorship infringement. At Cubix, we track work practices closely, allowing us to monitor when and how code is used.

Before initiating any project, we run our team with patent awareness program to reinforce the gravity of confidentiality and how to avoid infringement in the development process.

To protect for external authorship infringements Cubix aids with patent protection led by the team of lawyers. In many cases, clients request trade secrets protection, and we cover it with a well-drafted NDA to ensure complete confidentiality.

How does Cubix protect your intellectual property?

Our company is compliant with copyright laws and with United States regulations in regards to intellectual property protection.

The NDA starts our process. Before any discussions, we always have both parties sign an NDA that our lawyer drafts.

At Cubix, we provide the NDA document at the initial stage of idea disclosure, and you can edit it as needed. The NDA serves as the first step toward legal protection, and you must sign it before disclosing any technical ideas. This agreement binds both sides to protect all information and maintain strict confidentiality.