A Gold Standard for Clean Room Development to Protect From Intellectual Property Infections

Bob Zeidman, President, Zeidman Consulting

In many situations, a company encounters intellectual property that it cannot allow to spread to a product in development. One example is a joint development project between two companies where the IP for the jointly developed product cannot seep into other products. Another example is where two parties have a business relationship where they exchange products, but one party decides to terminate the relationship and design a replacement for the other party’s product. Yet another example is where one company is found to have misappropriated another company’s IP and, after litigation, is required by the court to redesign its product without utilizing any of the misappropriated IP. I will call the IP at issue “infection IP” because, like a disease in a human body, it cannot be allowed to spread within the company and certainly not to a new product. Ultimately the point of clean room development is to eliminate any infection IP or, in other words, reduce the chances of being sued and increase the chances of surviving any such litigation.

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USA Intellectual Property General November 2023 Vol.16, No. 65, Autumn 2023

Bob Zeidman

Bob Zeidman created the field of software forensics and founded Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation to develop and sell software forensics tools. He is the founder of Zeidman Consulting, an engineering consulting company that has worked on over 260 major litigations involving billions of dollars of disputed intellectual property. His cases have included ConnectU v. Facebook, on which the Oscar-winning movie The Social Network is based, and Oracle v. Google that went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. He is the inventor of the famous Silicon Valley Napkin on display at the Computer History Museum. He is also a high-stakes poker player, and his latest tech venture is Good Beat Poker, a new way to play and watch poker online. Bob wrote The Software Detective’s Handbook, the seminal textbook on software forensics. He has written articles and books on technology and business, award-winning novels and screenplays, and regular articles for various national magazines. His latest book is Election Hacks, the true story of how he challenged his own beliefs about voting machine hacking in the 2020 presidential election and made international news. Bob has a master's degree from Stanford University and two bachelor's degrees from Cornell University.

Zeidman Consulting

Zeidman Consulting provides hardware and software consulting and expert witnesses for all kinds of intellectual property litigation. Its consultants have years of experience reverse engineering hardware and software, analyzing and interpreting patents and trade secrets, comparing software to detect copyright infringement, and testifying at depositions and trials.

USA Intellectual Property General November 2023 Vol.16, No. 65, Autumn 2023