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

Abstract

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.