Fundamentals of International Business
IP Confidentiality and Contracts
Transcript
Voiceover: Bernie Wertz, Engineering Manager for Drivetrain Systems International and Charles Kang, Austrade Business Development Manager in Seoul speak about intellectual property, confidentiality and contracts.
Charles Kang: Something very important when you're launching in Korea with a new product, first thing is to protect your technology from copying. If you bring a very unique product or idea into Korea, if you don't have any prior protection tool, maybe in very near you see exactly the same product in Korea.
Bernie Wertz: In terms of intellectual property of course we do have confidentiality agreements with our customers, that work both ways because the level of information we have to exchange with the customerto make these product work in a vehicle are very deep and therefore confidentiality between us and the customer is important and is contractually secured . On the other side of course we only communicate to the customer what is absolutely necessary. So, in certain aspects this product is a black box to the customer, specifically software-wise we are not sharing that with the customer. We just share software interfaces.
A contract agreement we see with our customer is very similar, locally as well as overseas. It is a global industry so the standards are quite identical across the world. Typical contracts that we have in place are development and design development contracts. That's a contract that includes all the design and testing activities that need to be conducted by us to get a new product into the market or into a vehicle platform. A secondary type contract is of course a supply contract for the product once it is engineered and designed for that platform we typically have supply contracts which cover one or two vehicle generations so four to eight years in duration.