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21 June 2018Patents

TPN Europe 2018: Volvo Cars discusses protecting IoT data with IP

Car manufacturers will need to become more familiar with protecting digital products with IP amid the emergence of “fast and vast” data generated from the internet of things (IoT), a Volvo Cars counsel has said.

Anna Maria Lagerqvist Gahm, senior IP counsel at the Swedish company, told the Technology Patent Network (TPN) Europe conference in London today, June 21, that car companies are increasingly incorporating software products and applications, and there are many IP-related questions and challenges.

IoT devices are creating masses of data, according to Lagerqvist Gahm, who said that 50 billion machines are expected to be connected via the internet by 2020.

Most premium cars today are connected to a variety of devices and “so much data is created” from services such as GPS tracking (“in case you end up in an emergency”) and even in-car delivery services “allowing you to order dry cleaning or food to your car”, said Lagerqvist Gahm.

These new features allow car companies to create more services, enhance safety and boost the number of revenue streams, she said.

In IP terms, this new environment means companies need to “fundamentally shift how [they] think about IP”, focusing more on data, cloud computing, software development and methodologies, Lagerqvist Gahm explained.

This new landscape comes as Volvo Cars’ IP department has been “dragging behind” in relation to the IoT, Lagerqvist Gahm argued.

One of the major challenges in the IoT is deciding who owns the data, something which is “clearly more challenging than normal patent licensing”, she added. There are “many different ownership scenarios”, including the smart object manufacturer providing a licence to a customer as well as vice versa.

Volvo Cars would argue that it owns any non-personal data—information that “perhaps we don’t want to share as this is valuable and provides competitive insights”—but other stakeholders, including fleet owners, might also claim some ownership, Lagerqvist Gahm explained.

Outlining the challenges around licensing revenue models in this area, Lagerqvist Gahm said that Volvo Cars has discussed two models, the first where there is a one-off lump sum payment for data use. Under the second model, where data is shared continuously, licensees would ideally pay royalties when that data generates revenue for them, but Lagerqvist Gahm admitted that this would be “super difficult to enforce”.

Another challenge for Volvo Cars concerns the use of open source software (OSS), as Volvo Cars may use snippets or entire applications in its products. The issue is that licences range from being permissive to restrictive, “so it’s very important to understand the licences we are using before putting [the technology] in our products”, Lagerqvist Gahm said.

This has been a big challenge for IP departments such as Volvo Cars' “as we didn’t always have these considerations in mind”, so the car maker now has an OSS policy in place, Lagerqvist Gahm revealed.

Summarising, she told the audience to think about how best to benefit from data and, if they license data, to “understand who owns it”.

The TPN Europe conference is being hosted by World IP Review.

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