Software Engineering for Embedded Systems: Chapter 19. Intellectual Property

by Pete Wilson

Intellectual property normally means one of two things – the patents or other legal protections you have accumulated to protect your inventions, or the inventions and designs themselves. So we may talk about “licensing one’s intellectual property”, and mean either selling a license to someone to make use of your patented ideas, or selling a license to build, distribute or use a product, as ARM does with its processor and other designs or a tools company does with its compiler and OS products. In this chapter, we will be concentrating more on the first meaning – dealing with the legal protections around your work – and we will be covering the basics in two major sections, one covering the issues surrounding what you need to do to be sure that you actually do own that software that you wrote or bought, what you need to do when selling it or licensing it to others, including the role of “open software”; and the other covering the various protections you can obtain for your software and any valuable inventions in it.

29 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 1, 2013