Perhaps I find this fascinating because I have heard from so many entrepreneurs about how the options presented to them by the current intellectual property legal system fail to meet their needs. Or because of my research on copyright fixation. Or because I’m fairly convinced I was a magpie in a prior life. But through the diligence of a research assistant (thanks, Benton Patterson), I recently came across i-DEPOT, and I find it very interesting.
i-DEPOT is a sort of safe deposit box for ideas, offered in Benelux through the Benelux Office of Intellectual Property (BOIP). The website is very careful to say, repeatedly, that i-DEPOT does not convey any IP rights. Rather, it claims that i-DEPOT is a “legal means of proof that issues a date stamp,” providing that a particular individual is “the rightful owner of a particular creation at a specific date.” It does not offer legal protection at all, except in so far as it serves as a source of evidence. After a creator or inventor submits something to i-DEPOT, the individual receives a certificate with an assigned number. (Here I am tempted to analogize to the Universitatis Commitiatum E Pluribus Unum, but that might be unfair.)
The website of the BOIP recommends that i-DEPOT be used while an idea is in the development stage, or if an individual wants to keep her idea secret. Maybe the patent costs are too great, or the life-cycle of the product is so short that a patent would be worthless. It can also be used for IP rights that do not require formal registration, such as copyright (does this serve as a sort of official validation of the “poor man’s copyright”?). Finally, the BOIP suggests that i-DEPOT enables creators and inventors to feel more secure in negotiations with potential business partners by including the i-DEPOT number in a confidentiality agreement.
The BOIP frames this as a good first step in the innovation process. I’m interested to hear from others on this. What are your thoughts? Does anyone know about anything similar in other countries? Or about how widely used this is in Benelux?