http://www.securinginnovation.com/articles/innovationq/ en-us Copyright 2008 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:13:47 -0500 Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:11:31 -0500 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.34 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss don't hear about is lost or misplaced intellectual property. Companies keep this quiet since it is an embarrassing internal matter that they don't have to broadcast.

Yet IP data loss happens all the time. Flash drives and flash memory provide high capacity storage at a cheap price. Portable USB hard drives of up to 500GB are now available for very little money. This is big enough to house large corporate databases and as easy to lose as a cell phone. Which brings us to personal digital devices like cell phones and music players. These have substantial amounts of storage which often contain more than just someone's tunes or pictures of their cat.

All of this mobile storage creates an enormous IP problem. Most people don't realize that practically anything can be intellectual property. The end result is that almost everyone is, at some point, walking around with large amounts of intellectual property in an easy-to-lose form. Mobile storage also makes it very easy for folks to go over to the dark side and take intellectual property. It's now all too simple to copy large amounts of information and very hard to track when it happens.

The good news is that the only one who gets hurt if you lose your intellectual property is you (and your shareholders). If someone loses 150,000 Social Security numbers then there are 150,000 people at risk outside your company. The bad news is that you lose big. A simple "flash drive accident" may hand your competitor your most trusted secrets, jeopardizing new products, revenue, and reputation.

As bad as the bad is, it can be mitigated. First, make sure that you have copies of everything that might contain intellectual property in a secure location. This way, if you have to prove prior art, you can do so. If you need to prove that the information was taken(misappropriated), rather than accidentally lost,  you can do that too. Second, continuously monitor the landscape to see if anything is leaking. Many folks only survey the intellectual property space when they are applying for a patent. While there are a dozen reasons to do this, finding where your intellectual property is turning up is one of them. Finally, review important information for intellectual property on a regular basis. Not everything is important but you won't know that until you review it. This way everyone will have a better appreciation of what needs to be locked down and can't ever be copied to mobile storage or devices.

This is where IP.com can help. Our InnovationQ, Prior Art Database, and Patent Search Services can, when taken together, help secure your intellectual property, assist in making decisions about what is or is not IP,  and provide you the business intelligence you need when surveying the IP landscape.

Otherwise you might wake up one day and find your that your IP has sprouted legs and walked off.]]> http://www.securinginnovation.com/2008/02/articles/innovationq/flash-youve-just-lost-some-ip/ http://www.securinginnovation.com/2008/02/articles/innovationq/flash-youve-just-lost-some-ip/ InnovationQLegal Safeguarding Agentdata losstechnology Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:13:47 -0500 tpetrocelli@ip.com (Tom Petrocelli)