Like it or not, engineers are now responsible for much of the success of a product. You can expect this trend to continue in the electronics industry, so engineers must become more involved with documenting and promoting the protection of intellectual property (IP) associated with a given product. Intellectual property includes, among other things, designs, software listings, manufacturing techniques, and testing procedures.Engineers need to think more about how they can help protect IP by using one or more legal means, patents, copyrights, trademarks, or trade secrets. Each type of protection offers its own advantages and disadvantages.To start, you can think of the range of protection as forming a pyramid.The intellectual-property protection “pyramid” illustrates the levels of protection from the lowest “trade secrets” to the highest “patents”.Trade secrets provide broad protection, they have severe limits. The information must in fact be secret and the owner must take action to preserve this secrecy.Moving up the IP pyramid leads to copyrights, which cover works of authorship in program listings, graphic designs, schematic diagrams, and so on. A copyright gives the copyright owner an exclusive right to: Reproduce the work, Prepare derivative work, Distribute copies of the work, Display the work in public.Unfortunately for the electronics industry, copyright protection does not cover any idea, procedure, process, or concept described or illustrated in the copyrighted work. Thus, while copyrights may protect actual schematics, program listings, and so on, a copyright won’t protect the ideas in these documents.If you can’t protect your ideas with a copyright, you might at least consider how to brand, or mark them, so people know they originate from your company. A copyright protects only direct copying of an original artistic work, whereas a trademark can ...
