Aerospace and Drone IP Checklist: Technical Data Rights, Airworthiness Records, Export Classification, Supplier Terms, and Imagery Use

By Casey Scott McKay · 2025-06-19

This checklist audits an aerospace or uncrewed systems programme in the order the questions actually arise, beginning with export classification because that determination constrains every subsequent step and cannot be deferred. It then works through the technical data package inventory and tiering, the filing decisions that turn on detectability and remaining term rather than on novelty alone, the government funding history that determines what a customer may do with what it received, and the supplier terms that allocate design authority, approval holdership, and tooling. It covers maintenance data licensing, airborne software assurance and escrow, the imagery and collected-data questions specific to drone operations, and the transaction file. Gate items mark the points where work should stop. The traps are sequencing failures: classification made after the hire, funding history reconstructed after the delivery, and disclosure recorded after the grace period.

IP and Technology > Patent Counseling Transactions | Checklist | Published 19 June 2025 - Updated 1 September 2025 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us

Summary. This checklist audits an aerospace or uncrewed systems programme in the order the questions arise, beginning with export classification because that determination constrains every subsequent step. It works through the technical data package inventory and tiering, the filing decisions that turn on detectability and remaining term, the funding history that determines what a customer may do with what it received, and the supplier terms that allocate design authority, approval holdership, and tooling. It covers maintenance data licensing, software assurance and escrow, drone imagery and collected data, and the transaction file. The traps are sequencing failures.

Keywords: aerospace IP checklist · export classification · deemed export screening · technical data package · data rights assertions · foreign filing licence · parts manufacturer approval · design authority · tooling recovery · configuration control · maintenance data licensing · airborne software escrow · drone imagery · collected data ownership · transaction diligence

How to use this checklist

| Phase | What it establishes | Who runs it | Gate | |---|---|---|---| | 1. Classification | Who may work on the technology | Trade compliance and counsel | Written determination before any transfer | | 2. Access architecture | Whether disclosure is controlled | Counsel and IT | Screening live before onboarding | | 3. Data package | What the programme actually owns | Engineering and counsel | Assignments in place per document | | 4. Filing decisions | Patent, secret, or publication | Counsel with the bench | Detectability assessed before filing | | 5. Funding and data rights | What the customer may do | Programme finance and counsel | Assertions made at proposal | | 6. Suppliers | Whether the programme can re-source | Procurement and counsel | Design authority stated in writing | | 7. Maintenance data | What is supplied and on what terms | Aftermarket and counsel | Regulatory floor distinguished from commercial supply | | 8. Software | Whether the platform outlives the supplier | Engineering and counsel | Escrow verified, not merely deposited | | 9. Drone specifics | Who owns what the flight produced | Operations and counsel | Collected data allocated in the contract | | 10. Transaction file | Whether the business can be sold | Counsel | Eight answers assembled in advance |

The matter. A supplier has built actuators for military and commercial platforms for eleven years. Engineering is distributed across three countries. Development was funded partly by a defence contract and partly internally, with no component-level cost accounting. Tooling sits at two subcontractors and is unmarked. The design was shown at a trade show fourteen months ago. Nobody has ever produced a written export classification, and a private equity buyer has just asked for a data room.

Phase 1. Classify before anything moves

[ ] Determine jurisdiction for each product. Munitions list under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or Commerce Control List under the Export Administration Regulations.
- Why. The regimes differ in licensing, exemptions, recordkeeping, and penalties, and a programme operating on an assumption may have its entire compliance posture misdirected.
[ ] Apply the "specially designed" analysis rather than an intuitive one, because a component developed for a defence application with no other use is caught while commercial off-the-shelf items incorporated into a defence system generally are not.
[ ] Classify the technical data separately from the item, since data has its own status and may be controlled where the hardware is not.
[ ] Record the determination in writing, with the basis, and obtain a formal commodity jurisdiction or classification ruling where the answer is genuinely uncertain.
[ ] Re-classify on change. A product variant, a new destination, a regulatory amendment, or a new customer can change the answer without anyone in the business acting differently.
- Trap. Classification is treated as a one-time exercise, and the review is never attached to the sales pipeline where the changes originate.
[ ] [Gate] No technical data transfer, no programme hire, and no foreign associate instruction before the classification exists. Every one of those is potentially an export.

Phase 2. Build and test the access architecture

[ ] Identify the deemed export exposure. Disclosure of controlled technical data to a foreign national inside the United States is an export to that person's country of nationality.
[ ] List the routine activities that qualify: showing a drawing to an engineer on a work visa; granting repository access to a distributed team; sending a specification offshore; instructing a foreign patent associate; and demonstrating a system to a visiting customer.
[ ] Segregate the repositories with role-based and nationality-based access, and confirm the controls are technical rather than procedural.
[ ] Screen at hire and at contractor onboarding, with the record retained.
[ ] Control visitors with escort requirements and disclosure limits, and record what was shown.
[ ] Mark at creation, not retrospectively, and avoid blanket marking, which tribunals treat as marking nothing.
[ ] Maintain an access register by name, role, nationality, and material accessed, updated on personnel change.
- Why. This single document satisfies the export control obligation and supplies the reasonable measures evidence 18 U.S.C. § 1839 requires. Build it once and use it twice.
[ ] Check the foreign filing licence position on every pending application, because 35 U.S.C. § 184 requires a licence to file abroad within six months of a domestic filing and 35 U.S.C. § 185 makes the resulting patent invalid.
[ ] Screen for secrecy order exposure under 35 U.S.C. § 181 on applications touching sensitive subject matter.
[ ] [Gate] Confirm screening is operating before the next programme hire.

Phase 3. Inventory and tier the technical data package

[ ] List what the package contains: engineering drawings and models, materials and process specifications, tolerance and inspection requirements, test plans and results, structural and thermal analyses, qualification evidence, and the substantiating data behind any approval.
[ ] Establish ownership per document. Employee and contractor assignments executed and recorded; supplier contributions identified; jointly developed items flagged.
- Trap. The substantiating data behind an approval is frequently assembled from supplier inputs whose ownership nobody allocated.
[ ] Tier by sensitivity. Tier one is the data that would let a competitor obtain an approval; tier two is the design detail suppliers need of necessity; tier three should never leave.
[ ] Confirm the tiers are technically enforced, not merely documented.
[ ] Control delivery format. Native models and drawings held by the owner; suppliers given what they need to build rather than everything that exists.
[ ] Test the reconstruction question. Can engineering assemble a complete current package in a week without contacting any supplier?
- Why. This single test answers the re-sourcing question more honestly than any contract review, and the answer is usually no.
[ ] Verify configuration control. Every change approved, recorded, and traceable, because a part that does not match the approved design is not approved whoever made it.
[ ] [Gate] Confirm assignments cover every document before treating the package as an owned asset.

Phase 4. Make and record the filing decisions

[ ] Ask whether the term will still be running when the product earns revenue, given that a development and certification cycle can consume a decade of a twenty-year term against a platform flying for forty years.
[ ] Ask whether infringement would be detectable from the finished part. If not, a patent publishes the recipe in exchange for an unenforceable right, and Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp., 416 U.S. 470 (1974), confirms secrecy is a legitimate alternative.
[ ] Ask who funded it, because a federally funded invention carries a government licence, march-in exposure under 35 U.S.C. § 203, and a domestic manufacturing preference under 35 U.S.C. § 204.
[ ] File layered where you file: article claims, method of manufacture claims reaching the process and, through 35 U.S.C. § 271(g), imported products of it, system claims, and method of use claims.
[ ] File design registrations on anything visible — cabin interiors, seating, lighting, galley equipment, ground support equipment, drone airframes — under 35 U.S.C. § 171, with the total profits remedy of 35 U.S.C. § 289 available.
- Trap. Engineering-led organisations do not think of appearance as an asset, and these filings are the cheapest neglected protection in the sector.
[ ] Maintain a disclosure calendar covering trade shows, air shows, customer demonstrations, conference papers, and publications, reconciled against the filing programme — because 35 U.S.C. § 102 gives a one-year domestic grace period and none in most other jurisdictions.
[ ] Confirm Bayh-Dole disclosure and election under 35 U.S.C. § 202 for every subject invention, within the deadlines, which are missed regularly and are not always curable.
[ ] [Gate] No public disclosure of a fileable design before the filing decision is recorded.

Phase 5. Reconstruct funding and assert data rights

[ ] Establish the funding source for each deliverable item. Government funded, mixed, or exclusively private.
[ ] Confirm the cost accounting supports the assertion, because the category is decided by who paid and a contractor that cannot demonstrate exclusive private funding will deliver broader rights than intended.
[ ] Assert at proposal, in the assertions table, listing each item, the restriction, the basis, and the person asserting it.
- Trap. An unasserted restriction is generally a waived one, and the assertion happens at proposal rather than at delivery.
[ ] Apply correct legends under 48 C.F.R. § 252.227-7013 for technical data and 48 C.F.R. § 252.227-7014 for noncommercial software, because a nonconforming legend can be challenged and a successful challenge strips the restriction.
[ ] Flow the discipline down. A supplier's limited rights data delivered without the correct legend creates a problem for both parties.
[ ] Support any commercial item determination rather than asserting it, because commerciality carries a more favourable rights position and is contested for exactly that reason.
[ ] Diarise challenge windows, since a government challenge to an asserted restriction carries a response period and a missed response is a lost restriction.
[ ] [Gate] Do not deliver technical data under a government contract without the assertion and the legend in place.

Phase 6. Audit the supplier terms

[ ] State design authority explicitly for each relationship. Build-to-print means the supplier manufactures your design; build-to-spec means the supplier designed to your performance requirement and owns what it created.
- Trap. The customer that assumed the first while buying the second discovers it at requalification, when the fix requires the supplier's cooperation.
[ ] Identify who holds each approval. A supplier holding the parts approval for a component holds a position you cannot transfer to an alternative source.
[ ] Where continuity matters, require co-holdership, a transfer obligation, or delivery of substantiating data sufficient for you or a successor to obtain your own approval.
[ ] Allocate the technical data package: ownership, delivery in native formats, delivery on each engineering change rather than on termination, and assignment of design rights from every contributor.
[ ] Bucket improvements into improvements to your design, improvements to the supplier's general capability, and joint developments — with a licence back where assignment is unenforceable under the supplier's governing law.
[ ] Handle tooling physically. Title, marking with your name and an asset number, photographed; lien waiver; right of access and removal; notice before any relocation including to a subcontractor.
- Why. Aerospace jigs, fixtures, and dies are expensive, long-lived, and routinely unmarked, and unmarked tooling in a facility holding tools for many customers is practically unrecoverable.
[ ] Impose change control. No change to materials, process, subcontractor, or facility without written approval, with incoming inspection records retained.
[ ] Extend confidentiality to subcontractors and individuals, with executed agreements produced rather than flow-down assumed.
[ ] Plan obsolescence, because long product lives guarantee supplier exits and the data package delivery obligation is what lets you re-source.
[ ] Write the exit: technology transfer surviving termination for cause, tool return with a deadline and a remedy, a priced transition period, and post-termination restrictions.
[ ] [Gate] Do not release tooling payment without an executed title, marking, lien-waiver, and access clause.

Phase 7. Set the maintenance data strategy

[ ] Separate the regulatory floor from commercial supply. Instructions for continued airworthiness must be made available; everything beyond is a commercial decision on your terms.
[ ] Draft the licence deliberately: who may use the data, for which aircraft, at which locations, whether sublicensing to a subcontracted repair station is permitted, what copying is allowed, and what happens on termination.
[ ] Price the tiers. Operator, authorised service centre, and independent repair station are different relationships with different competitive consequences.
[ ] Register the copyright in the manual set, because 17 U.S.C. § 412 conditions statutory damages and fees on timely registration.
[ ] Assess the antitrust boundary. Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Technical Services, Inc., 504 U.S. 451 (1992), permits an aftermarket monopolisation claim where lock-in is real, and a manufacturer that supplied data and then withdrew it is in a worse position than one that never supplied it.
[ ] Anticipate the repair development request, and decide the policy deliberately rather than case by case.
[ ] Maintain configuration records, because they determine whether a given airframe is in an approved configuration and the holder of a complete history holds something valuable in every transaction.

Phase 8. Airborne and ground software

[ ] Inventory the design assurance artefacts: requirements, design descriptions, verification evidence, traceability matrices, and configuration records.
- Why. This artefact set is the barrier in exactly the way the hardware data package is, and a competitor with the same functional requirements still needs its own qualification evidence.
[ ] Confirm ownership, because airborne software is written by suppliers, integrators, and contract developers and absent assignment belongs to whoever wrote it.
[ ] Run an open source scan across airborne applications, ground systems, and tooling, with a bill of materials as a contractual deliverable refreshed each release and warranted for accuracy.
[ ] Address field loadable software: who may issue an update, what happens if the supplier exits, and whether the operator may load unapproved software.
[ ] Treat cybersecurity as an airworthiness matter, because a vulnerability is now a certification question.
[ ] Escrow with verification and an annual refresh, plus a survival licence sufficient to maintain and update deployed systems.
- Trap. A deposit made once and never refreshed is two engineering change cycles out of date when the supplier fails.
[ ] Classify the software for export, because source code and detailed design documentation are technical data.
[ ] [Gate] Confirm escrow verification, not merely deposit, before relying on it in a continuity plan.

Phase 9. Drone and uncrewed specifics

[ ] Confirm the operating authorisation — the small uncrewed aircraft rule, a waiver, an exemption, or a type certification pathway — and re-check rather than assume, because the framework is still forming.
[ ] Address remote identification, which creates a broadcast data stream with its own privacy and data questions.
[ ] Assess the imagery position honestly. 17 U.S.C. § 120(a) permits pictorial representations of constructed architectural works ordinarily visible from a public place, so a property owner's copyright objection to aerial photography generally fails.
[ ] Locate the objection where it actually lies — privacy, trespass, nuisance, and state overflight statutes — and note that United States v. Causby, 328 U.S. 256 (1946), recognised a limited property interest in the immediate reaches above land while rejecting ownership above that.
[ ] Track state and local restrictions jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and the federal preemption question they raise.
[ ] Allocate the collected data expressly in every customer contract: imagery, point clouds, derived models, ownership, licensing, retention, and permitted reuse.
- Why. That data, not the flight, is the deliverable's value, and no purchase order addresses it.
[ ] Screen for privacy exposure where imagery captures identifiable people or private spaces, engaging state privacy statutes and, in some contexts, biometric regimes.
[ ] Apply the supply chain discipline at speed, because flight controllers, sensors, and airframes are sourced globally under purchase orders that allocate nothing and will govern the programme for years.

Phase 10. Brand, aftermarket, and the transaction file

[ ] Use the marking and traceability the regulator already requires as the anticounterfeiting programme's data, because part numbers, serial numbers, batch codes, and certification documents serve both purposes.
[ ] Record marks with customs under 19 U.S.C. § 1526, which is inexpensive and is the precondition to seizure.
[ ] Use the unapproved parts reporting route for misrepresented components, which is faster than any infringement action.
[ ] Consider section 337 under 19 U.S.C. § 1337 for imported counterfeit or infringing parts, because an exclusion order reaches the goods without jurisdiction over the foreign maker.
[ ] Expect nominative use by the legitimate aftermarket, following Prestonettes, Inc. v. Coty, 264 U.S. 359 (1924), and require disclosure of reconditioning under Champion Spark Plug Co. v. Sanders, 331 U.S. 125 (1947).
[ ] Run any service centre designation as a real licence with standards, inspection, and records, because an uncontrolled designation risks abandonment under 15 U.S.C. § 1127 and weakens the safety signal it exists to send.
[ ] Assemble the transaction file: certificate holdership and transfer requirements; data package completeness with supporting assignments; funding history by component; export classification and licence history including any disclosures; supplier agreement assignability; open source bill of materials; configuration records; and the patent portfolio last.
[ ] [Gate] Assemble it in the ordinary course rather than under a signed term sheet, because it takes weeks under pressure and days to maintain.

Outcome. At the end of this checklist a programme should be able to state, from records that exist: what its export classification is and on what basis; who may lawfully see each tier of its technical data; that every document in the package is owned and assigned; why each invention was patented, kept secret, or published; what funding produced each deliverable and what rights were asserted; which supplier holds design authority and which approval; where every tool is and whose name is on it; what maintenance data is supplied and on what terms; that its software can be maintained after its supplier is gone; who owns what each flight produced; and that a buyer's eight questions can be answered in a week. A programme that can state those things owns its position. One that cannot occupies it on the assumption that nothing will change — in an industry whose products outlive everyone who built them.

Phase 11. Working the matter in the opening example

Applied to the actuator supplier described above, the checklist produces a sequence rather than a list.

[ ] Classification is the emergency, because engineering is distributed across three countries and no written determination exists. Eleven years of potential deemed exports is a voluntary disclosure question, and it should be assessed by counsel before the data room opens rather than discovered in it.
[ ] Funding history is the second finding. No component-level cost accounting means the supplier cannot demonstrate exclusive private funding, which means data delivered under the defence contract may carry government purpose rights permitting release to competitors.
[ ] The trade show fourteen months ago ended the foreign rights on whatever was shown, and left roughly nothing of the domestic grace period. Anything still fileable should be identified this week.
[ ] The unmarked tooling at two subcontractors is recoverable now and may not be later. Marking, photographing, and registering it requires no agreement and should happen before any relationship changes.
[ ] The data package reconstruction test will show whether the supplier can re-source its own subcontracted parts, and the answer will inform the buyer's view of the business more than the patent list will.
[ ] And the transaction file should be assembled honestly, with the classification gap disclosed and a remediation plan attached — because a buyer told the truth prices a defined problem, and a buyer who discovers it prices an unknown one and adds an indemnity.
[ ] [Gate] Do not open the data room before the classification assessment is complete. Producing controlled technical data to a buyer's foreign advisers would compound the original problem.

Phase 12. Cadence and proportion

[ ] A machine shop building to a customer's print needs a classification, confidentiality obligations, and nothing else here.
[ ] A component supplier with design authority needs the data package tiered and protected, the funding history tracked, design filings on anything visible, and supplier terms allocating tooling and approval holdership.
[ ] A systems integrator or airframer needs the full programme plus configuration control, joint programme allocation, maintenance data strategy, and an anticounterfeiting programme.
[ ] A drone operator needs collected data allocated, the imagery and privacy position understood, and airspace restrictions tracked by jurisdiction.
[ ] Review annually, with the classification review attached to the sales pipeline rather than to a legal calendar.
[ ] Review on trigger: a new programme, a new supplier, a new market or platform variant, a change in funding source, a regulatory change affecting classification or the operating rule, and any approach from a buyer or investor.
[ ] And attach the recurring questions to reviews that already happen — the programme review, supplier onboarding, proposal submission, and design release — because a standalone compliance calendar does not survive a change of personnel and an embedded question does.

Phase 13. Joint programmes and collaboration

[ ] List the background technology each participant brings, item by item, rather than reserving pre-existing intellectual property generically.
- Trap. A generic reservation is unenforceable in practice when the dispute arrives and the parties are arguing about what a particular subsystem drew on.
[ ] Allocate the foreground expressly, because absent agreement 35 U.S.C. § 262 permits each co-owner to exploit and licence without accounting to the others.
[ ] Determine inventorship correctly under 35 U.S.C. § 116, which is decided by contribution to conception and cannot be allocated by contract.
[ ] Draft field of use divisions carefully, because aerospace domains overlap in ways generic language does not capture.
[ ] Model the government participation, since joint funding delivers government purpose rights the participants may not have contemplated.
[ ] Obtain export authorisations for internal collaboration where the programme spans jurisdictions, because a technical exchange between partners across a border is an export.
[ ] Address risk and revenue sharing arrangements as principal relationships, not vendor ones, which makes background and foreground allocation the central negotiation rather than a schedule.
[ ] [Gate] Write the exit before the programme starts. Programmes run for decades, participants change, and a partner leaving without a defined licence to what it contributed and received leaves an unusable position on both sides.

Phase 14. Documents this checklist should leave behind

[ ] A classification file with jurisdiction and control determinations for every product and every category of technical data, and the basis for each.
[ ] A technology control plan: repository structure, access roles, screening process, marking convention, visitor procedure, and the access register.
[ ] A technical data package inventory, tiered, with ownership and assignment status per document.
[ ] A funding history record at component level supporting each data rights assertion.
[ ] A filing decision log recording the detectability assessment and the route chosen for each invention.
[ ] A disclosure calendar reconciled against the filing programme.
[ ] An assertions table per government contract, with legends applied and challenge windows diarised.
[ ] A supplier register recording design authority, approval holdership, tooling location and marking, data package delivery status, and exit obligations.
[ ] A software bill of materials per release with escrow deposit and verification records.
[ ] A maintenance data licensing schedule distinguishing regulatory obligations from commercial supply.
[ ] And the transaction file assembling the eight diligence answers.

Eleven documents. A programme holding them can operate lawfully, defend its position, re-source a part, survive a supplier failure, and answer a buyer in a week. One that does not is relying on the memories of people who will leave before the product does.

Phase 15. Questions to put to the programme

[ ] "Show me the export classification." If the answer is a belief rather than a document, that is the first finding and everything else waits.
[ ] "Who is on the access list for the substantiating data, and what are their nationalities?" The answer is both an export question and a reasonable measures question, and most programmes cannot produce the list at all.
[ ] "Can engineering assemble a complete current data package in a week without calling a supplier?" Engineering will say yes and then discover that the current process parameters were set on a subcontractor's floor.
[ ] "Which supplier holds the approval for this component?" If it is the supplier rather than you, re-sourcing is not a procurement decision.
[ ] "Where is the tooling and whose name is on it?" Ask for photographs with the marking visible; the absence of marking is the answer.
[ ] "What did we show at the last trade show, and what was filed before it?" The gap between those two lists is a permanent loss of foreign rights.
[ ] "How was this component funded?" If programme finance cannot answer at component level, the data rights position is whatever the government says it is.
[ ] "When was the escrow last verified?" Deposited and verified are different words, and only one of them means the deposit can be built from.
[ ] "Who owns the imagery from last month's survey flight?" For a drone operation this is the deliverable's value, and the purchase order almost certainly does not say.

Phase 16. A working timetable

[ ] Weeks one and two. Classification determinations for products and technical data, in writing, with a formal request where genuinely uncertain. Nothing else starts first.
[ ] Weeks two to five. Technology control plan stood up: repository segregation, nationality screening at hire and onboarding, marking convention, visitor controls, and the access register. Engineers briefed on the deemed export activity list.
[ ] Weeks four to eight. Technical data package inventory and tiering, with ownership and assignment status per document and the reconstruction test run.
[ ] Weeks six to ten. Funding history reconstruction at component level, and the data rights position that follows. The item most likely to be impossible if left later.
[ ] Weeks eight to twelve. Filing review: detectability assessments, disclosure calendar reconciliation, design registration candidates, Bayh-Dole disclosure and election status, and the foreign filing licence position on every pending application.
[ ] Weeks ten to sixteen. Supplier agreement audit and template fix, with tooling marked and registered as a parallel unilateral task requiring no agreement.
[ ] Weeks fourteen to twenty. Maintenance data strategy, software bill of materials, escrow verification, and customs recordation.
[ ] Weeks eighteen to twenty-four. Transaction file assembled, annual review calendar set, and the recurring questions attached to the programme review, supplier onboarding, proposal submission, and design release.
[ ] [Gate] Do the unilateral items first. Marking the tooling, building the register, inventorying the package, and reconstructing the funding history require nobody's agreement and resolve most of the evidentiary exposure.

A closing note

Nothing in this checklist requires a novel legal theory, and very little of it is patent work.

It requires knowing what the export classification is, who paid for each item, who may see which tier of data, whose name is on the tooling, which supplier holds which approval, and what was disclosed before it was filed.

Six facts, all of them recorded somewhere or nowhere, and all of them determining the programme's position for the forty or fifty years the product will be in service.

The sequencing is what makes this area unforgiving. Classification precedes hiring. Funding history cannot be reconstructed. Assertions cannot be made after delivery. Grace periods run from disclosures nobody logged. Tooling cannot be marked after a relationship sours.

Which is why the checklist is ordered as it is, and why the gates matter more than the individual items: each one marks a point past which an omission stops being correctable.

And why the highest-value intervention is the earliest one. A practitioner who asks, in the first meeting, what the approval is, who holds the data behind it, how it was funded, and where the drawings actually live has identified in twenty minutes everything that will matter for the life of the programme.

The rest of the programme is execution, and execution here is mostly a matter of attaching those four questions to reviews the business already holds.

That is a modest ambition, and in a sector where the products outlive everyone who built them it is the only kind of control that lasts.

Build the controls for the successor, not for the person holding the file today.

Key Authorities at a Glance

| Authority | Proposition | Where it bites | |---|---|---| | 49 U.S.C. § 44704 | Type, production, and airworthiness certificates | Phase 10 | | 49 U.S.C. § 44701 | Safety regulation authority | The certification scheme | | 14 C.F.R. Part 21 | Certification procedures; parts approval | Phases 6 and 10 | | 14 C.F.R. Part 43 | Maintenance and alteration | Phase 7 | | 14 C.F.R. Part 107 | Small uncrewed aircraft operations | Phase 9 | | 22 C.F.R. Part 120 | ITAR; technical data; deemed exports | Phases 1 and 2 | | 15 C.F.R. Part 774 | Commerce Control List | Phase 1 | | 35 U.S.C. § 181 | Secrecy orders | Phase 2 | | 35 U.S.C. § 184 | Foreign filing licence | Phase 2 | | 35 U.S.C. § 185 | Invalidity for unlicensed filing | Phase 2 | | 35 U.S.C. § 102 | Novelty; grace period | Phase 4 | | 35 U.S.C. § 171 | Design patents | Phase 4 | | 35 U.S.C. § 271(g) | Imported products of a patented process | Phase 4 | | 35 U.S.C. § 289 | Total profits | Phase 4 | | 35 U.S.C. § 202 | Election of title; deadlines | Phase 4 | | 35 U.S.C. § 203 | March-in rights | Phase 4 | | 35 U.S.C. § 204 | Manufacturing preference | Phase 4 | | 48 C.F.R. § 252.227-7013 | Technical data rights and legends | Phase 5 | | 48 C.F.R. § 252.227-7014 | Noncommercial software rights | Phase 5 | | 18 U.S.C. § 1839 | Trade secret; reasonable measures | Phases 2 and 3 | | 18 U.S.C. § 1836 | DTSA civil action | Enforcement | | 17 U.S.C. § 120(a) | Pictorial representations of buildings | Phase 9 | | 17 U.S.C. § 412 | Statutory damages for manuals | Phase 7 | | 15 U.S.C. § 1127 | Abandonment; naked licensing | Phase 10 | | 19 U.S.C. § 1337 | Exclusion orders | Phase 10 | | 19 U.S.C. § 1526 | Customs recordation | Phase 10 | | United States v. Causby, 328 U.S. 256 (1946) | Limited interest in low airspace | Phase 9 | | Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Technical Servs., 504 U.S. 451 (1992) | Aftermarket monopolisation | Phase 7 | | Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp., 416 U.S. 470 (1974) | Trade secret coexists with patent | Phase 4 |

The five things people get wrong

One: classifying after the fact. The programme hires, the team distributes, the associates are instructed, and years later somebody asks whether the technology is on the munitions list. The determination costs a few days and constrains everything; the omission produces a voluntary disclosure and an unpriceable diligence finding. Classify in writing, before any transfer, and re-classify on every product variant and new destination.

Two: losing the funding history. Data rights categories are decided by who paid for the development of each item, and a contractor without component-level cost accounting cannot demonstrate exclusive private funding — so it delivers government purpose rights it never intended to give. Track funding at component level from day one, because reconstructing it during a validation challenge is not realistic.

Three: treating the patent as the protection. A twenty-year term is short against a fifty-year product life, detection is hard, and government rights hollow out the exclusivity on federally funded work. The certification barrier and the substantiating data behind it are what a competitor cannot replicate, and a programme that protects the patent while leaving the data package uncontrolled has secured the lesser asset.

Four: leaving tooling unmarked. Jigs, fixtures, and dies at subcontractors, paid for by the customer, unmarked and unregistered — practically unrecoverable when the relationship ends and the tools sit in a facility holding tools for a dozen customers. Marking costs nothing, requires no agreement, and decides the argument.

Five: depositing escrow without verifying it. A platform supported for fifty years will outlive its software supplier, and a deposit made once and never refreshed is stale by the time it is needed. Verify at deposit, refresh annually, and pair it with a survival licence sufficient to maintain and update deployed systems — because a deposit nobody can build from is a filing cabinet with a fee attached.