INDUSTRY FACT: “U.S. Intellectual Property theft costs more than $300 billion annually, and puts a significant dent in the profits enjoyed by U.S. industry.” - THE IP COMMISSION REPORT, 2013
In this technologically advanced day and age, physical and digital security are not enough to protect your most important asset: your intellectual property (IP). Your company likely already has trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks, or patents in place, but sometimes you need more. Especially when your most serious threat is coming from within your walls. According to the U.S. State of Cybercrime Survey, current and former employees are one of the greatest cyber security threats today.
Often IP threats lead to litigation. From 1994 to 2014, more than 9,000 IP cases were filed each year on average in the U.S. District Courts. Litigation often revolves around the issue of when your idea is conceptualized and proof that you created it. Proof of ownership for Trade Secret Law includes existence, ownership, notice, and access (EONA). If your trade secret is challenged, you will have to prove that your IP is, in fact, your own. Are you prepared?
An Intellectual Property Development Protection Agreement (IPDPA) from Iron Mountain helps to safeguard technology ownership, plus enhances and enables existing potential legal protection under trade secret, copyright, and patent laws. An IPDPA can provide necessary key evidence of when, how, and by whom a technology was developed. This independent collection of evidence by Iron Mountain can significantly strengthen a company’s position in any legal dispute concerning intellectual property rights.
When you establish an IPDPA with Iron Mountain, 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 Iron Mountain acting as a neutral, experienced third party to protect your IP, a secure escrow deposit can be used to document the development of your company’s technology. As a result, others who may claim to have created the technology first may find it more difficult to substantiate their case.
As the company that is recognized industry-wide for commercializing technology escrow back in 1982, Iron Mountain has proven to be a trustworthy partner since the very beginning. Today, Iron Mountain has an international reputation for offering a unique combination of source code escrow experience, specialized technology experience and unrivaled security. As the company that still sets the standard, Iron Mountain continues to refine the way parties on both sides of the table analyze, assess, validate and secure assets. Trust us to take the headaches out of intellectual property protection and let us deliver real peace of mind.
“IP is used everywhere in the economy, and IP rights support innovation and creativity in virtually every U.S. industry” -INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND THE U.S. ECONOMY: INDUSTRIES IN FOCUS
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, including:
How are customers using IP Development Protection Agreements from Iron Mountain? Here are some of the innovative uses of IPDPA:
NCC Group Software Resilience has acquired Iron Mountain’s Intellectual Property Management (IPM) business. For more information on the acquisition, please visit our dedicated information hub, or contact Iron Mountain IPM.
