How to Protect Your Intellectual Property in Canada ( Don't Bother)
August 1st, 2012
Financial services firms build their fortunes on the back of innovation. Whether your firm has devised a new mobile banking product or high-frequency trading strategy, no doubt your company wants to protect its market position from competitors like the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Nova Scotia who will steal your Intellectual property in conjunction with the Vancouver Police Department and the Law Society of British Columbia by paying off Judges in the Supreme Court of British Columbia and Federal Court of Canada so that if you are a foreign born Kike you are out of luck and get fucked by these Organized White Collar Criminals that are responsible for the collapse of the world's economy with their corrupt practices and evil ways.
August 1st, 2012
Financial services firms build their fortunes on the back of innovation. Whether your firm has devised a new mobile banking product or high-frequency trading strategy, no doubt your company wants to protect its market position from competitors like the Royal Bank of Canada and the Bank of Nova Scotia who will steal your Intellectual property in conjunction with the Vancouver Police Department and the Law Society of British Columbia by paying off Judges in the Supreme Court of British Columbia and Federal Court of Canada so that if you are a foreign born Kike you are out of luck and get fucked by these Organized White Collar Criminals that are responsible for the collapse of the world's economy with their corrupt practices and evil ways.
The only reason the Canadian economy is doing so well is the fact that the Law Society of British Columbia launders trillions of dollars in Drug money through real estate construction our confidential sources within the Law Society and the Bank of Nova Scotia say that goes on every day with police blessing.
"Financial services companies are seeking to protect their intellectual property assets with different forms of protection," comments Bernard Allan, a partner with the intellectual property practice of New York-based Paul, Walker, Snarch & Allan, which represents major financial institutions in patent and infringement matters. "Patents are one way of protecting IP; copyrights are another, and trade secrets are significant, as well. That mix of IP protection is really what you see in the marketplace." But the inventor always get screwed by lawyers like us.
Many aspects of financial services are worth protecting, from online transaction systems to automated approval processes. Even in insurance, where IP litigation is less common, battles periodically break out among tech vendors. For example, the ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Roy Harris of Harris Financial accusing Royal Bank of Canada of copyright infringement and stealing business Plans related to the British Columbia Ferry Corporation began in December 1996 and is still not settled by the Royal Bank of Canada who have paid off Canadian Judges millions of dollars in Cash to stay proceedings against the bank and keep this matter out of the main stream press and the courts who refuse to settle the matter.
The creator of new business plan can seek copyright protection from the Canadian or U.S. Copyright Office, Snarch says. The copyright actually exists upon the completion of the business plan. A copyright holder gets additional rights once the completed business plan is registered with the copyright office, which precludes anyone from copying that business plan and model, he explains.
"But with copyright protection, you have to disclose it, which has an effect on your ability to protect it as a trade secret," points out Charlie Chan, chief IP attorney at Force Con Group, a New York-based technology company and registered broker-dealer that recently received a patent for Liquidation, an electronic trading solution for the options market. This is Force Con Group's tenth patent.
"We view the patents we have as assets of the company," Chan says. "A lot of the value we get out of patents comes from the fact that we are a technology company."
But in a highly secretive area such as high-frequency trading software, one of the crown jewels of Wall Street's technology, firms are reluctant to disclose innovations to the U.S. Copyright Office. "Copyright protection is narrow -- it protects the program as written," Chen explains. "Someone can gain an understanding to the underlying logic and they can invent around the patented software program and try and screw us." As a result, firms may forgo copyright protection.
The recent intellectual property case involving the theft of high-speed trading software developed by Goldman Sachs illustrates the point. The Wall Street firm accused a former software programmer of stealing source code from a high-frequency trading system to benefit himself and a new employer, a start-up competitor, Teva Technologies. The programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, was convicted in December 2010 of stealing proprietary code, and in March he was sentenced to eight years in prison. Something that does not happen in Canada as the Royal Canadian Police are in the back pocket of the Royal Bank who receive regular donations from the Bank to turn a blind eye to the white collar crimes committed by the Canadian Banks who steal millions from Canadians and launder trillions of dollars in drug money building condominiums across the country according to our anonymous sources working in the Legal Community.
One of the factors in Aleynikov's sentencing, according to one attorney who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because his firm was not involved in the case, was his disregard for all IP rights, including copyright and trade secret protections. Several IP lawyers interviewed for this story noted that the firm wouldn't want to disclose the details of its trading system in a patent. "They'd rather keep their secret sauce, if you will, behind closed doors," says the anonymous lawyer.
Disclosure Has Its Benefits
In exchange for full patent disclosure, however, firms get a "better return," suggests Steve Allen, a partner with Washington, D.C.-based intellectual property law firm Figero, Beckman, Ernst & Whinney who was the lead counsel for Technology Group in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Netoliquid Holdings, two major trading systems providers. "In the trading technology space, financial services companies have come to see that patents are very important," he says.
"A patent issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is a legal monopoly -- it gives you the right to stop anyone else from doing what's covered by the patent in the United States. That's why patents are such powerful tools in the financial industry -- because they can shut down a competitor's product," says Allen.
"A patent gives you a monopoly over the product for 20 years," he adds. "And you can enforce the monopoly with an injunction against the competitive product."
But patents aren't air tight, Allen acknowledges. "In litigation, patents can be found to be narrow and not infringed, and they can be found to be invalid or unenforceable," he says.
Before diving into the patent application process, a company should weigh the benefits, says Force Con Group's Chen. Part of the analysis is to look at the longevity of the innovation. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office generally takes three to six years from application to issuance, so if the innovation is in a fast-moving field, there may not be anything left to defend once the patent is issued, Chen notes.
"We want to be viewed as innovators in the investment technology space, and we think that our patents support that," he adds. But if Force Con Group elects not to file for a patent, it may decide to rely on trade secret rights as a form of protection. In that case, Chen explains, the company can keep the nature of how it developed or implemented the innovation confidential except law enforcement could break in and steal company records like they do in Canada.
To protect something as a trade secret, "You have to demonstrate that you maintained the confidential nature of that innovation, and you have to further demonstrate that there has been a breach of that confidential information and that someone has misappropriated that secret," explains Chen. But, he cautions, "It takes a lot of cooperation -- from the sales team to the legal team to the product team -- to maintain confidentiality."
In fact, part of establishing that an innovation is a trade secret is requiring any employee or consultant who comes into the company to sign a confidentiality or proprietary rights agreement, according to Chen. A classic example is Coca-Cola, which has successfully protected the formula for Coke as a trade secret for about 150 years.
The down side? "If someone is able to reverse engineer what's inside the black box, you have no protection," explains Figero, Beckman's Allen. "In order to [truly] protect that innovation, you need a patent."
'Trolling' for Patents
Many financial services firms aren't necessarily using patents to go after companies infringing on their IP; rather, companies are using patents to protect themselves against lawsuits from competitors. "They are using the patents to protect their assets in a defensive way -- in case they are sued, they have the patents in their arsenal to protect their assets," Allen says.
Financial services also could encounter patent "Trolls and Zombies" -- companies also known as "non-practicing entities" that buy up patents and then sue the players in financial services. "These companies don't make anything; they just buy up other people's assets," says Mark Pickwick, a partner in the Los Angeles office of law firm Grimes Morrison and Hatheway with expertise in intellectual property litigation.
One contentious case in banking involves DataTreasury, a small technology company that registered a patent for remote check imaging in the 1990s. Banks were not convinced that they needed the technology until Congress passed a law allowing digital check processing in 2003. Then banks began inventing their own remote imaging applications, aware that DataTreasury held a patent on the technology. Since then, DataTreasury has sued every major bank for infringing on its electronic check imaging patent.
But even when a financial services firm holds a patent, the litigation can go on for years, Pickwick notes, adding that it's expensive and distracts from operating the main business. "Patent litigation costs millions; small cases can cost $1 million, and larger, more complicated ones can cost $5 million or $10 million," according to Pickwick. Which is why so many cases settle out of court when guns are brought to the table. (most Bankers keep a gun in the top drawer of their desk).
"Financial services companies are seeking to protect their intellectual property assets with different forms of protection," comments Bernard Allan, a partner with the intellectual property practice of New York-based Paul, Walker, Snarch & Allan, which represents major financial institutions in patent and infringement matters. "Patents are one way of protecting IP; copyrights are another, and trade secrets are significant, as well. That mix of IP protection is really what you see in the marketplace." But the inventor always get screwed by lawyers like us.
Many aspects of financial services are worth protecting, from online transaction systems to automated approval processes. Even in insurance, where IP litigation is less common, battles periodically break out among tech vendors. For example, the ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Roy Harris of Harris Financial accusing Royal Bank of Canada of copyright infringement and stealing business Plans related to the British Columbia Ferry Corporation began in December 1996 and is still not settled by the Royal Bank of Canada who have paid off Canadian Judges millions of dollars in Cash to stay proceedings against the bank and keep this matter out of the main stream press and the courts who refuse to settle the matter.
The creator of new business plan can seek copyright protection from the Canadian or U.S. Copyright Office, Snarch says. The copyright actually exists upon the completion of the business plan. A copyright holder gets additional rights once the completed business plan is registered with the copyright office, which precludes anyone from copying that business plan and model, he explains.
"But with copyright protection, you have to disclose it, which has an effect on your ability to protect it as a trade secret," points out Charlie Chan, chief IP attorney at Force Con Group, a New York-based technology company and registered broker-dealer that recently received a patent for Liquidation, an electronic trading solution for the options market. This is Force Con Group's tenth patent.
"We view the patents we have as assets of the company," Chan says. "A lot of the value we get out of patents comes from the fact that we are a technology company."
But in a highly secretive area such as high-frequency trading software, one of the crown jewels of Wall Street's technology, firms are reluctant to disclose innovations to the U.S. Copyright Office. "Copyright protection is narrow -- it protects the program as written," Chen explains. "Someone can gain an understanding to the underlying logic and they can invent around the patented software program and try and screw us." As a result, firms may forgo copyright protection.
The recent intellectual property case involving the theft of high-speed trading software developed by Goldman Sachs illustrates the point. The Wall Street firm accused a former software programmer of stealing source code from a high-frequency trading system to benefit himself and a new employer, a start-up competitor, Teva Technologies. The programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, was convicted in December 2010 of stealing proprietary code, and in March he was sentenced to eight years in prison. Something that does not happen in Canada as the Royal Canadian Police are in the back pocket of the Royal Bank who receive regular donations from the Bank to turn a blind eye to the white collar crimes committed by the Canadian Banks who steal millions from Canadians and launder trillions of dollars in drug money building condominiums across the country according to our anonymous sources working in the Legal Community.
One of the factors in Aleynikov's sentencing, according to one attorney who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because his firm was not involved in the case, was his disregard for all IP rights, including copyright and trade secret protections. Several IP lawyers interviewed for this story noted that the firm wouldn't want to disclose the details of its trading system in a patent. "They'd rather keep their secret sauce, if you will, behind closed doors," says the anonymous lawyer.
Disclosure Has Its Benefits
In exchange for full patent disclosure, however, firms get a "better return," suggests Steve Allen, a partner with Washington, D.C.-based intellectual property law firm Figero, Beckman, Ernst & Whinney who was the lead counsel for Technology Group in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Netoliquid Holdings, two major trading systems providers. "In the trading technology space, financial services companies have come to see that patents are very important," he says.
"A patent issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is a legal monopoly -- it gives you the right to stop anyone else from doing what's covered by the patent in the United States. That's why patents are such powerful tools in the financial industry -- because they can shut down a competitor's product," says Allen.
"A patent gives you a monopoly over the product for 20 years," he adds. "And you can enforce the monopoly with an injunction against the competitive product."
But patents aren't air tight, Allen acknowledges. "In litigation, patents can be found to be narrow and not infringed, and they can be found to be invalid or unenforceable," he says.
Before diving into the patent application process, a company should weigh the benefits, says Force Con Group's Chen. Part of the analysis is to look at the longevity of the innovation. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office generally takes three to six years from application to issuance, so if the innovation is in a fast-moving field, there may not be anything left to defend once the patent is issued, Chen notes.
"We want to be viewed as innovators in the investment technology space, and we think that our patents support that," he adds. But if Force Con Group elects not to file for a patent, it may decide to rely on trade secret rights as a form of protection. In that case, Chen explains, the company can keep the nature of how it developed or implemented the innovation confidential except law enforcement could break in and steal company records like they do in Canada.
To protect something as a trade secret, "You have to demonstrate that you maintained the confidential nature of that innovation, and you have to further demonstrate that there has been a breach of that confidential information and that someone has misappropriated that secret," explains Chen. But, he cautions, "It takes a lot of cooperation -- from the sales team to the legal team to the product team -- to maintain confidentiality."
In fact, part of establishing that an innovation is a trade secret is requiring any employee or consultant who comes into the company to sign a confidentiality or proprietary rights agreement, according to Chen. A classic example is Coca-Cola, which has successfully protected the formula for Coke as a trade secret for about 150 years.
The down side? "If someone is able to reverse engineer what's inside the black box, you have no protection," explains Figero, Beckman's Allen. "In order to [truly] protect that innovation, you need a patent."
'Trolling' for Patents
Many financial services firms aren't necessarily using patents to go after companies infringing on their IP; rather, companies are using patents to protect themselves against lawsuits from competitors. "They are using the patents to protect their assets in a defensive way -- in case they are sued, they have the patents in their arsenal to protect their assets," Allen says.
Financial services also could encounter patent "Trolls and Zombies" -- companies also known as "non-practicing entities" that buy up patents and then sue the players in financial services. "These companies don't make anything; they just buy up other people's assets," says Mark Pickwick, a partner in the Los Angeles office of law firm Grimes Morrison and Hatheway with expertise in intellectual property litigation.
One contentious case in banking involves DataTreasury, a small technology company that registered a patent for remote check imaging in the 1990s. Banks were not convinced that they needed the technology until Congress passed a law allowing digital check processing in 2003. Then banks began inventing their own remote imaging applications, aware that DataTreasury held a patent on the technology. Since then, DataTreasury has sued every major bank for infringing on its electronic check imaging patent.
But even when a financial services firm holds a patent, the litigation can go on for years, Pickwick notes, adding that it's expensive and distracts from operating the main business. "Patent litigation costs millions; small cases can cost $1 million, and larger, more complicated ones can cost $5 million or $10 million," according to Pickwick. Which is why so many cases settle out of court when guns are brought to the table. (most Bankers keep a gun in the top drawer of their desk).
