Creative Ways to Extract Value from Software Intellectual Property

If you have been involved in the Intellectual Property industry for even as little as six months, I am sure you have heard of the Alice v. CLS Bank case and the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision regarding it.  This decision effectively neutered many companies’ software patents and, along with Inter Parte reviews, killed software patent protection through litigation, as we know it.  Companies are now left with virtually useless patents on their software and, from what I hear from our clients, a lot of apprehension on filing suit against potential infringers.  This has also affected the TAEUS business because we have traditionally done quite a bit of software reverse engineering work for our clients on patent-related cases. 

All is not lost, however, as there are companies out there who are not satisfied with the status quo and are willing to take risks to protect their software IP.  Now, when I say IP, I am not referring to software patents, but rather, software copyrights.   

TAEUS was approached by a client who was referred to us from an expert of ours on an existing project (see Fish Finder Blog post).  This client had valuable intellectual property that dealt with media delivery and they suspected that a Chinese company was using their copyrighted code.  TAEUS put together a crack team of software reverse engineering experts and dove into both our client’s code and the potential infringer’s code.  What we found confirmed our client’s suspicions and was frankly astonishing.  Our line-by-line comparisons of both sets of code yielded results that were nearly an exact match between the two codes!  Maybe this Chinese company thought that because of the Alice decision they had carte blanche when it came to copying their competitors’ IP.  Think again.  People’s ideas are still valuable, regardless of shortsighted legislation passed down from Washington.

Do you think your copyrighted code may be being infringed by a competitor?  Are you losing market share to someone whose products seem to be eerily similar to yours?  Call TAEUS.  We know how to help you protect your IP, we have been doing it for 25 years and will continue to do so as long as ideas need to be protected. 

Written by: Sebastian Nutter