Balough Uses Autonomous Vehicles to Explain IoT Intellectual Property Issues

(October 11, 2016) The intellectual property issues associated with autonomous vehicles provides a timely case study to assist business lawyers in advising their clients on use of the Internet of Things (IoT).

In a presentation entitled “Autonomous Vehicles A Stalking Horse for Intellectual Property Rights in the Internet of Things,” Richard C. Balough explained how elements of the IoT—the hardware, the applications, and the data—may be protected under intellectual property law.

For the hardware, from “a legal perspective, there is nothing extraordinary,” Mr. Balough said. Traditional protections of patent and trade secret law apply. Application software may be protected by copyright law, but he noted that clients need to be aware of restrictions when open source code is incorporated into IoT processes. Finally, he warned that to protect data there must be a clear understanding of who owns the data, which may restrict how it can be used.

The presentation was part of the American Bar Association’s webinar “Internet of Things: Key Legal Considerations” on October 9, 2016.