Intellectual Property

George Kimball and Mark W. Heaphy

Chapter 8 in Outsourcing Agreements, 2025, pp 217-241 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Chapter 8 begins with an overview of basic concepts concerning patents, copyrights and trade secrets, before discussing protection of confidential information of various kinds (e.g., confidential business information), standards of care, permitted uses and disclosures. We then discuss rights of ownership, emphasizing rights in new developments created during the course of performance. We recommend a practical approach, based on operational realities and business fundamentals, with each party owning improvements to its proprietary systems (e.g., the customer's proprietary software, the supplier's internal tools and commercial software and service offerings); but rights in new wholly-new developments created for particular engagements are negotiable and may be allocated in various ways that permit the parties to carry on their businesses, whichever party owns underlying rights. We conclude with a brief discussion of open source issues and the challenges presented by transformation through such novel technologies as generative AI, robotics, and deep machine learning, for which both market norms and underlying intellectual property rights remain unsettled.

Keywords: Outsourcing; Business Process Outsourcing; BPO; Information Technology Outsourcing; ITO; Intellectual Property; IP; Patent; Copyright; Confidentiality; IP ownership; Artificial Intelligence; Generative AI (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035316984
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035316991.00016 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:22570_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().