What Investors Check in IP Due Diligence Before Funding
Before a financing or acquisition closes, counsel will test your chain of title, registrations, licenses, and open-source use. Here is the list, in order.
Before a financing or acquisition closes, counsel will test your chain of title, registrations, licenses, and open-source use. Here is the list, in order.
Courts ask what you actually did to keep the information secret. Here is the layered checklist, from NDAs and access controls to exit interviews and marking.
A USPTO post-registration audit asks you to prove use for extra goods in your Section 8 declaration. Fail to respond and the whole registration is cancelled.
An NDA is necessary but rarely sufficient. Marking clauses, fixed terms, residuals, and a missing whistleblower notice can quietly weaken trade secret claims.
Yes. Source code is a literary work, but the deposit rules, trade secret options, and version strategy decide how much the registration is worth. Here is how.
Expungement removes goods a registered mark was never used for; reexamination targets use claimed on a date it did not exist. Timing decides which one fits.