24 May 2010
By Richard Neff

Ownership Disputes in Technology Deals

By Richard E. Neff, May 24, 2010: Reprinted and/or reposted with the permission of Daily Journal Corp. (2010). One of the most fought-over issues in technology development and licensing agreements concerns intellectual property ownership. Superficially, who owns the intellectual property should be easy to resolve. The developer or publisher of a proprietary computer software program virtually always owns the computer program (except for possible open source components). Nobody contests Microsoft's ownership of Excel, or Autodesk's ownership of AutoCAD. At the other end of the spectrum, when a large company commissions a development house or even individual developer to do custom…
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17 May 2010
By Richard Neff

Managing Risk in Technology Licensing

By Richard E. Neff, May 17, 2010: Reprinted and/or reposted with the permission of Daily Journal Corp. (2010). In technology licensing the most difficult jumble of contractual issues generally involve the relationship between indemnification and limitation of liability, particularly the question of the patent indemnity. This is the "negative" lottery in technology contracts, a "loser pays all" provision if not drafted properly. At the heart of this issue is the great unknown surrounding software and business method patents. The United States took the lead in patenting software and computer-implemented inventions, and also in patenting business methods, often used to protect…
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