Extractive Industry IP Checklist: Geological Data Ownership, Process and Metallurgy Secrecy, Joint Venture Terms, Contractor Controls, and Community Agreements

By Casey Scott McKay · 2024-08-13

This checklist audits the intellectual property position of a mining, oil and gas, or natural resources business in the order the questions arise. It begins with the data register, because subsurface data is the sector's principal asset and no company has listed it in one place with its terms. It then works through the process protection decision and the prior use record that makes secrecy safe, joint venture technology clauses, contractor and supplier terms, community agreements, disclosure obligations, the software the business now writes, departures, and closure. Gate items mark the points at which work should stop until a specific artefact exists.

IP and Technology > General IP | Checklist | Published 13 August 2024 - Updated 12 March 2026 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us

Summary. This checklist audits the IP position of a mining, oil and gas, or natural resources business in the order the questions arise. It begins with the data register, because subsurface data is the sector's principal asset and no company has listed it in one place with its terms. It then works through the process protection decision and the prior use record that makes secrecy safe, joint venture technology clauses, contractor and supplier terms, community agreements, disclosure obligations, the software the business now writes, departures, and closure. Gate items mark where work should stop.

Keywords: extractive IP checklist · data register · seismic licence audit · change of control trigger · process secrecy decision · prior commercial use record · background technology · foreground allocation · contractor return obligations · assay laboratory terms · reagent development ownership · equipment telemetry · traditional knowledge permissions · technical report review · closure data retention

How to use this checklist

| Phase | What it produces | Who runs it | Gate | |---|---|---|---| | 1. Data register | Every dataset with its terms and holders | Counsel and data management | Register exists before any transaction | | 2. Process decision | A recorded secrecy or filing choice plus a prior use record | Counsel and metallurgy | Record is contemporaneous | | 3. Joint ventures | Four technology clauses fixed | Counsel and commercial | Foreground not jointly owned | | 4. Contractors | Terms written for technical data | Procurement and counsel | Return obligations enforced | | 5. Suppliers | Telemetry, formulation, and diagnostic terms | Procurement and counsel | Reagent development term present | | 6. Community | Permissions, records, and benefit sharing | Social performance and counsel | IP practitioner in the room | | 7. Disclosure | Technical report and claim review | Counsel | Review before filing | | 8. Software | A protection decision per item | Counsel and technical services | Contributor chain traced | | 9. Departures | Identification, measures, and exit process | HR and counsel | Exit process run every time | | 10. Closure | Retention and transfer decisions | Counsel | Data transfer expressly addressed |

The matter. A mid-tier producer operates four mines, holds two development projects, and is a 30 per cent partner in a joint venture operated by a major. Its seismic and geophysical libraries were licensed over fifteen years by a geoscience department. Its flotation reagent scheme was developed with a supplier over six years and is why one deposit is economic. Three exploration managers have left in four years. An acquisition approach arrived last month and the buyer has asked for a schedule of intellectual property.

Phase 1. Build the data register

[ ] Create one row per dataset: geochemical surveys, geophysical surveys, seismic volumes, drill logs, core photography, assays, structural interpretations, resource models, metallurgical testwork, hydrogeology, and environmental baselines.
[ ] Record for each: owned or licensed; licensor and terms; regulatory reporting obligation and confidentiality expiry; who holds copies including contractors, consultants, partners, and lenders' advisers; what happens on tenure surrender, joint venture exit, or sale; and where the master copy lives.
[ ] Audit every multi-client seismic licence against six provisions: the grant and whether it is limited to internal use; transfer on assignment; change of control; reprocessing rights and ownership of reprocessed volumes; disclosure to partners, lenders, and prospective purchasers; and termination consequences for derived interpretations.
- Trap. Change-of-control provisions can trigger across an entire library at once, producing an unbudgeted liability nobody identified because the licences sat with the geoscience department rather than with legal.
[ ] Confirm whether raw field records as well as processed products belong to the company under proprietary acquisition contracts, since reprocessing with better algorithms is where old surveys yield new answers.
[ ] Check data acquired on jointly held ground for each partner's rights, including whether a withdrawing partner keeps a copy.
[ ] Confirm data from predecessors in title actually transferred rather than being assumed to have transferred.
[ ] Establish the legal character of each dataset. Assay results are compilations of facts with thin protection at best after Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.; interpretations and models involve authorship; the whole is protectable as a trade secret if treated as one under 18 U.S.C. § 1839.
[ ] Flag what becomes public and when, since regulatory confidentiality periods expire on schedules a competitor can track.
[ ] [Gate] No data room opens and no sale agreement is warranted until the register exists.

Ranking the assets, so the register has a purpose

Before running the register, agree with management where the value actually sits. The ranking is counterintuitive to people who think of the business as owning rocks, and stating it changes how the technical teams and the legal function talk to each other.

First: the subsurface data and its interpretation. Exploration spending buys information, and the information is what makes tenure worth anything. A company that lost its geological database and kept its tenure would have to spend the exploration budget again. A company that lost the tenure and kept the database would know exactly where to look and would be first in line when the ground came open.

Second: the process knowledge. In a marginal deposit — which is most deposits — the difference between economic and uneconomic is recovery, and recovery is process. That knowledge is orebody-specific and effectively impossible to replicate without the same ore and the same years.

Third: the operating knowledge. Maintenance regimes, blending strategies, and the accumulated understanding of what breaks and why. Unglamorous and close to the cost line.

Fourth: the planning and optimisation models. Encoded operating knowledge, increasingly separable from the people who built it and therefore increasingly portable in a way the same knowledge in a mine manager's head was not.

Fifth: the corporate and project brands. Real, particularly for companies raising capital, and cheap to protect relative to everything above.

Last: the patents. Present in most portfolios, useful in some, rarely the reason the business makes money.

[ ] Present the ranking to management before starting the register, so the exercise is understood as an asset inventory rather than a compliance task.
[ ] Interview the technical leads with three questions: what would hurt most if a competitor had it, what took longest to work out, and who outside the company has seen it. The answers are the register, and the third produces a disclosure map that is invariably longer than legal expects.

Phase 2. Make and document the process protection decision

[ ] Default to secrecy for metallurgical and processing knowledge, and record the reasoning.
- Why. Detection is effectively impossible — a competitor's circuit runs inside a plant you cannot enter, on ore you cannot sample. The disclosure is a gift to a small number of competitors facing the same problem. The advantage is orebody-specific and durable in a way a patent term is not, and Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp. confirms the choice is legitimate.
[ ] Build the prior commercial use record contemporaneously: what was used, in what form, at which operation, and from when.
- Trap. 35 U.S.C. § 273 protects a party who commercially used the subject matter in good faith more than a year before a patent's effective filing date, but a record assembled after an assertion arrives is worth very little.
[ ] File on the exceptions: inventions embodied in equipment sold to third parties; technology intended for licensing; processes observable from a public vantage or inferable from the product; and defensive positions against a named competitor.
[ ] Consider defensive publication where the only concern is being blocked by someone else's filing.
[ ] Name the trade secret categories: reagent schemes, grind and liberation parameters, leach chemistry, blending strategy, control set points, and maintenance regimes.
[ ] Apply marking at creation, role-based access, and technical-data confidentiality terms for every disclosure to a vendor or testwork provider.
[ ] Claim confidential treatment at submission where environmental permitting, tailings characterisation, or reagent inventory reporting requires disclosure of process detail to a regulator.
[ ] [Gate] No process is disclosed to a testwork provider or regulator before the categories are named and the terms are in place.

Seismic and geophysical licences, provision by provision

[ ] Read the grant clause for the words "internal use." That phrase alone excludes a great deal of what the company intends, including disclosure to a partner and reprocessing by a third party.
[ ] Find the assignment provision and record whether the licence follows an asset sale, whether consent is required, and what fee applies.
- Trap. A seller warranting transferability without checking has warranted something it may not be able to deliver, and the discovery happens after signing.
[ ] Find the change-of-control provision and record whether a corporate transaction triggers a fee or a re-licensing obligation, and whether it does so library-wide.
[ ] Record the reprocessing position: whether the licensee may reprocess, whether a third-party processor is permitted, and who owns the reprocessed volume. A licence reserving reprocessing to the licensor has withheld the data's most valuable future.
[ ] Record the disclosure position: whether the data may be shown to a partner, a lender's technical adviser, or a prospective purchaser, and whether the recipient needs a separate licence. Data room disclosure of licensed seismic happens constantly and is frequently not permitted.
[ ] Record termination consequences for derived interpretations, since an interpretation built on terminated data may itself be encumbered.
[ ] Attach the fee schedule where one exists, and flag every survey with a change-of-control trigger.
[ ] Check for government-funded or subsidised acquisition, which may carry deposit or disclosure obligations that survive.

Phase 3. Fix the joint venture technology clauses

[ ] State that background technology remains with the contributing party, with the venture receiving a licence limited to the project.
- Why. A major contributing processing expertise to a venture with a junior needs this in terms. Silence produces an argument that the venture acquired rights, and that argument is worth a great deal when the process is what makes the deposit economic.
[ ] Never leave foreground technology jointly owned. Allocate it to one party with a licence to the other, or to the venture with express exit terms.
- Trap. Co-owners may each practise and license without accounting to the other absent agreement, per 35 U.S.C. § 262, which makes a jointly owned venture patent a patent each partner may use at its other projects and license to your competitors.
[ ] Address operator learnings — whether the operator may apply project knowledge at its other operations, and on what terms.
[ ] Fix exit data rights expressly: what a withdrawing or diluted party keeps, must return, and may use.
- Trap. The area of interest clause is drafted in terms of ground rather than knowledge, so a partner excluded from staking nearby remains free to use the geological insight anywhere else.
[ ] Apply a technical-data confidentiality regime to technical committee records, since they distribute detailed operating and geological information to partners who may be competitors elsewhere.
[ ] Read the information rights in streaming and royalty financings, not just the economics, because reporting obligations can amount to continuous disclosure of operating information to a counterparty with competing interests.
[ ] Check farm-in and earn-in agreements for whether data generated during the earn-in period transfers with the earned interest or stays with the funder.
[ ] [Gate] No joint venture agreement is executed with foreground technology jointly owned.

Reading a farm-in or earn-in for its data provisions

Earn-in structures are where data ownership is most often left ambiguous, because the parties' attention is on expenditure milestones and vesting percentages.

[ ] Establish who owns data generated during the earn-in period before the interest vests, and whether ownership changes when it does.
[ ] Establish what a party who fails to earn in retains. A funder that spends heavily, does not vest, and walks away with the full dataset has bought an exploration programme rather than an interest — which may be exactly what it intended.
[ ] Check whether the vendor of the ground retains a copy and on what terms it may use it, particularly where the vendor holds adjacent tenure.
[ ] Confirm reporting obligations during the earn-in do not amount to a continuous transfer of interpretation to a party who may withdraw.
[ ] Address the treatment of samples and core, which are physical assets carrying information and are routinely consumed by testing.
[ ] Check whether the earn-in permits the funder to use project data at other properties it holds in the district.

Technical committee and management committee records

[ ] Apply named-category confidentiality to committee papers, since they distribute detailed operating and geological information to partners who may compete elsewhere.
[ ] Restrict onward circulation within a partner's organisation to named individuals with a project role.
[ ] Address the position of secondees, who sit inside the operator's team, see everything, and return to a competitor's payroll.
[ ] Provide for return or destruction of committee materials on exit, and enforce it.

Phase 4. Rewrite contractor and consultant terms

[ ] Require express ownership of deliverables and of work product generated using client data in every service agreement.
[ ] Write confidentiality by named category of technical information rather than relying on a general commercial clause.
[ ] Impose secure handling and storage requirements, since exploration data routinely moves by email attachment.
[ ] Restrict work within a defined area for a defined period where enforceable in the jurisdiction, recognising that consulting geologists work across projects by design and that terms which cannot distinguish project-specific information from general professional skill are either unenforceable or unusable.
[ ] Impose return or destruction obligations with certification, and enforce them.
- Why. An unenforced clause is affirmative evidence that the measures were not reasonable under 18 U.S.C. § 1839.
[ ] Prohibit retention of derivative datasets, which is how a contractor keeps the substance while returning the file.
[ ] Give assay laboratory agreements specific attention, since a laboratory serving several explorers in one district holds a comparative picture nobody else has and its confidentiality terms are typically drafted for a commodity service.
[ ] Address ownership of resource models, software configurations, and estimation methodology in estimation consultant agreements, because the question has transaction consequences.
[ ] Address ownership of testwork results and of process improvements developed during the work in metallurgical services agreements.
[ ] [Gate] No exploration or testwork programme starts under a contract lacking deliverable ownership and return obligations.

Phase 5. Fix the supply terms

[ ] Negotiate ownership of operating data generated by equipment, bound the manufacturer's use of it, and require deletion on disposal.
- Trap. A haulage fleet reporting telemetry to a manufacturer that also supplies competitors is exposing operating parameters through a channel nobody negotiated.
[ ] Settle who owns a reagent or consumable formulation developed against the company's ore, and whether the supplier may sell it to others.
- Why. This is the highest-value supply term in a processing operation and it is usually absent. It determines whether a metallurgical advantage lasts a year or a decade.
[ ] Require configuration export in a documented format from automation and control vendors, since the control configuration encodes the operating strategy and vendor lock at that layer is stickier than at any hardware layer.
[ ] Negotiate parts and service terms at purchase. Repair is permitted and reconstruction is not, per Aro Manufacturing Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., and an authorised sale exhausts the patent right regardless of post-sale conditions per Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc. — so restrictions run in contract or not at all.
[ ] Address diagnostic access expressly, since software locks engage 17 U.S.C. § 1201 and its triennial exemption process rather than providing a stable entitlement either way.
[ ] Check whether the supplier's own IP position is secure, particularly where it depends on a sub-tier source.
[ ] [Gate] No fleet or plant purchase completes without the telemetry and diagnostic access terms resolved.

Phase 6. Bring the IP function into community agreements

[ ] Define the categories of traditional knowledge the project will encounter — seasonal water behaviour, species distribution, site locations, land use history — with a mechanism for adding categories.
- Trap. A clause referring generally to "traditional knowledge" is unusable, because nobody can later say whether a particular use fell inside it.
[ ] Separate permission to use, permission to record, and permission to publish, because a regulator's process will demand the third and the first two do not supply it.
[ ] Establish a route for restricted information — for example, a constraint expressed as an exclusion zone whose basis is not stated — before the assessment process begins.
[ ] Identify who may grant permission by reference to the community's own governance, since a permission from a body without authority is not a permission.
[ ] Address what happens to consultation records, mapped information, and studies at closure, including on a sale or wind-up.
[ ] State whether benefit-sharing obligations attach, how they are measured, and whether they survive transfer of the asset, recognising that the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol framework is implemented unevenly and that contractual practice has run ahead of the statutory position.
[ ] Obtain permission for use of community names, designs, imagery, and language in branding, signage, and reporting.
[ ] Treat baseline social studies, health data, employment records, and consultation records as personal data and community data simultaneously.
[ ] [Gate] No community agreement is signed without an IP practitioner having read the knowledge and records provisions.

Phase 7. Manage the disclosure obligations

[ ] Review every technical report before filing, with someone reading for competitive disclosure rather than for compliance.
- Why. The standard requires enough for an investor to understand the basis of the estimate. It does not require process detail beyond what supports the recovery assumption, and technical authors write for a technical audience.
[ ] Confirm the patent filing position before a technical report is published, since a report is a publication and the grace period in 35 U.S.C. § 102 is a rescue that does not exist in most jurisdictions where protection may be wanted.
[ ] Track the schedule on which regulatory submissions become public, including drilling results, production data, environmental monitoring, and closure plans.
[ ] Build the substantiation file before any sustainability or origin claim is made, covering emissions intensity, water use, tailings management, and community outcomes.
- Trap. These are advertising when directed at investors and customers, and unsubstantiated environmental claims are actionable under 15 U.S.C. § 1125 where a competitor is harmed and under consumer protection authority otherwise.
[ ] Confirm compliance status for every certification and chain-of-custody scheme in use, since these function as certification mark systems under the framework at 15 U.S.C. § 1127 and withdrawal removes access to a premium market.
[ ] Check investor-facing materials for imitation risk, since resource sector fraud frequently operates by cloning legitimate companies, with claims available under 15 U.S.C. § 1114 alongside securities enforcement.
[ ] Register the corporate mark where capital is raised, not only where ground is held, and register material project names.
[ ] [Gate] No technical report is filed and no sustainability claim is published without a completed review record.

The brand and investor-facing work

[ ] Register the corporate mark in the jurisdictions where capital is raised, not only where ground is held. A junior explorer's brand operates in a securities market, which may be on a different continent from its projects.
[ ] Register material project names. A deposit acquires a name early and it appears in every technical report and news release for a decade, accumulating goodwill in the capital markets.
- Trap. A company that has used the same name for a district and for a single deposit within it has created ambiguity about what transfers on a sale, and the ambiguity is discovered when the buyer starts publishing under the name.
[ ] Monitor for imitation of investor-facing materials. Resource sector fraud operates by cloning legitimate companies — similar names, copied websites, forged technical reports circulated to retail investors — and a cloned investor-relations site is an urgent matter rather than a nuisance.
[ ] Maintain a takedown workflow with registrars and hosts, since speed matters more than remedy in this category.
[ ] Apply ordinary quality control where technology or services are licensed commercially under the company's marks.
[ ] Check that certification and chain-of-custody marks are used only within the certifier's rules, because the right to use depends on verified compliance rather than on ordinary licensing and withdrawal is not negotiated.
[ ] Review conference presentations and site visit materials alongside technical reports, since both routinely contain process detail that no disclosure standard requires.

Phase 8. Decide the position on internally written software

[ ] Inventory what exists: resource modelling and estimation workflows; mine planning and cutoff optimisation; process control and real-time optimisation; autonomous haulage and drilling; exploration targeting on historical datasets; and scripting layers built over commercial packages.
[ ] Default to secrecy for planning and control models, which are unobservable from outside and whose value lies in accumulated tuning.
[ ] Where filing is warranted, draft to the technical improvement standard, since claims face 35 U.S.C. § 101 and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International and survive when they recite an improvement to a control or measurement process rather than a better commercial outcome.
[ ] Trace contributor ownership, including consultants, graduate students on sponsored projects, and employees who wrote code at previous employers, and confirm assignments are present-tense.
[ ] Inventory open source, since scientific computing draws heavily on it and distribution to a partner or contractor may trigger obligations.
[ ] Document exploration targeting provenance, which is unusually clean where models are trained on the company's own historical record — and a clean provenance record is a valuation input in a way an assumed one is not.
[ ] Apply the autonomy analysis where operations are automating: sensor data ownership, model protection, safety documentation control, and integrator terms.
[ ] [Gate] The protection decision is recorded per item rather than defaulted.

Phase 9. Manage departures

[ ] Build the ability to identify trade secrets with particularity before a departure occurs. "Our exploration data" is not an identification; "the structural interpretation of the northeast zone dated March, the assays from holes 44 through 71, and the target ranking model" is.
[ ] Confirm measures that can be proved: marking, role-based access, an access log, and confidentiality terms naming categories.
- Trap. A company whose exploration database sits on an open network share has answered the reasonable measures question against itself before anyone asks it.
[ ] Run a structured exit every time: access revoked on the day, devices returned and imaged, an interview walking the named categories with a signed acknowledgement, and forensic review where circumstances warrant.
[ ] Obtain an onboarding acknowledgement from every incoming hire that they will not bring or use a former employer's confidential material.
[ ] Understand the limits. 18 U.S.C. § 1836 contains an express limit on enjoining employment based merely on what a person knows, and the inevitable disclosure doctrine is accepted in some jurisdictions and rejected in others. A geologist is entitled to remain a geologist.
[ ] [Gate] No engineering, geological, or metallurgical departure proceeds without the exit process.

Secondees, visitors, and site tours

[ ] Treat secondees as a distinct category. A partner's secondee sits inside the operator's team, sees everything, and returns to a payroll that may compete elsewhere. The secondment agreement should carry its own confidentiality terms, an access scope, and a post-secondment restriction where enforceable.
[ ] Control site visits by investors, analysts, and prospective purchasers. A plant tour discloses the circuit configuration to anyone able to read it, and analyst notes published afterwards have described process detail the company had never disclosed.
[ ] Brief the people conducting tours on what may and may not be described. The site manager giving a tour is not thinking about trade secrets and has no reason to unless told.
[ ] Apply the same discipline to conference presentations and technical papers, which are a legitimate part of professional life and a routine disclosure channel.
[ ] Record what was shown and to whom, because the disclosure map matters when a competitor later appears to know something.

Phase 10. Plan for transfer and closure

[ ] Address data transfer expressly in every sale agreement. A sale of mineral rights does not transfer the geological database, the process knowledge, or the software.
[ ] Decide what the seller retains from divested properties, since depleted or sold ground is re-evaluated when prices or technology change and the retained dataset is an option on that future.
[ ] Set retention policy for the technical record deliberately, because closure obligations run for decades, disputes turn on what was known and when, and the decision is otherwise made by a facilities manager on storage cost.
[ ] Confirm the closure record will survive the operating company: hydrogeology, geochemistry, tailings characterisation, and monitoring history.
[ ] Honour post-closure community obligations, including data held under benefit-sharing and cultural agreements that extend beyond operations.
[ ] Assemble the transaction file: the data register, the process protection decision and prior use record, the joint venture technology positions, the contractor and supplier terms, the community permissions, and the chain of title for any registered rights.
[ ] [Gate] The file is complete when every answer is supported by a document.

A note on order

The phases are ordered by dependency and by the cost of delay.

The data register is first because it is the input to every later phase and because the three findings that most often derail a transaction — an untransferable seismic library, a dataset held by a contractor with no return obligation, and a joint venture partner's retained copy — all surface while building it rather than during the analysis that follows.

The process decision is second because the prior commercial use record must be contemporaneous. Every month of delay is a month of evidence not created, and unlike most items on this list it cannot be reconstructed later at any price.

Joint venture clauses come next because amendments are practically achievable only at a scheduled review, which means the value of the work depends on when it happens relative to the venture's calendar rather than on how well it is done.

Contractor and supplier terms are template changes that apply prospectively. The sooner they are made, the larger the share of the company's relationships they cover, which is an argument for making them imperfectly and early rather than perfectly and late.

Community agreements are deliberately not scheduled, because they cannot be. They arrive when a negotiation opens, and the only way to be in the room is to have established beforehand that the IP function should be told. That establishment is itself a task, and it belongs in the first month.

Disclosure, software, departures, and closure are ongoing programmes rather than projects. Each needs an owner and a trigger rather than a completion date.

The transaction file is last because it is a compilation of everything above, and a file assembled first contains assertions rather than documents.

[ ] Confirm insurance and indemnity arrangements cover intellectual property claims at all, since general liability policies routinely exclude them and specialist cover is rarely purchased in this sector.
[ ] Check whether any lender's security extends to the geological database and the process knowledge, which are frequently the most valuable assets in the security package and the ones least clearly described in it.

Outcome. A business that has run this checklist can tell a buyer which of its datasets can actually be transferred, whether its reagent scheme is protected or merely undisclosed, what the joint venture partner is entitled to take away, and whether three departed exploration managers left with the district synthesis. Those four answers are worth more than the schedule of trademarks the buyer originally asked for, and none of them is available from the general counsel's registered rights list.

Key Authorities at a Glance

| Authority | What it settles | Phase | |---|---|---| | Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. | Facts unprotectable; thin protection for compilations | 1 | | 18 U.S.C. § 1839 | Reasonable measures element of trade secret status | 1, 2, 4, 9 | | 18 U.S.C. § 1836 | Federal civil misappropriation claim and its employment limit | 9 | | Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp. | Trade secret protection coexists with the patent system | 2 | | 35 U.S.C. § 273 | Prior commercial use defence | 2 | | 35 U.S.C. § 262 | Co-owners may practise and license without accounting | 3 | | 35 U.S.C. § 102 | Novelty, public use, and the grace period | 7 | | 35 U.S.C. § 101 | Patentable subject matter | 8 | | Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International | Two-step eligibility framework | 8 | | 35 U.S.C. § 112 | Written description and enablement | 2, 8 | | Aro Manufacturing Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co. | Repair permitted, reconstruction not | 5 | | Impression Products, Inc. v. Lexmark International, Inc. | Authorised sale exhausts the patent right | 5 | | 17 U.S.C. § 1201 | Circumvention and triennial exemptions | 5 | | 17 U.S.C. § 102 | Copyright subject matter; ideas unprotected | 1 | | 15 U.S.C. § 1125 | False designation of origin and false advertising | 7 | | 15 U.S.C. § 1127 | Definitions including certification marks | 7 | | 15 U.S.C. § 1114 | Infringement of a registered mark | 7 |

The five things people get wrong

One: scheduling the trademarks and calling it the IP position. The registered rights list in an extractive business is the least valuable thing it owns. The subsurface data, the process knowledge, and the operating models are worth more, in that order, and none of them appears in a search of a registry. A schedule that lists four marks and two equipment patents is not wrong so much as beside the point, and a buyer who accepts it is buying an unexamined position.

Two: leaving the seismic licences with the geoscience department. Multi-client seismic is licensed rather than owned, and the licences restrict transfer, reprocessing, and disclosure in ways that surface after signing. Change-of-control provisions can trigger across an entire library at once. The register takes two weeks and it prevents a category of transaction problem that costs orders of magnitude more, and the reason it is never built is that nobody in either department thinks it is their job.

Three: assuming secrecy protects itself. Deciding not to patent a process is usually correct in this sector. Deciding it and then doing nothing else is not. Secrecy requires named categories, marking, access control, technical-data confidentiality terms, an enforced return obligation, and a contemporaneous prior commercial use record. A company that has "kept the process confidential" by not talking about it has no protectable position and no defence if someone else files.

Four: jointly owning foreground technology. It sounds equitable in a negotiation about capital contributions and it is a mistake. Co-owners may each practise and license without accounting, which means a jointly owned venture patent is available to your partner at every other project it operates and licensable to your competitors. Allocate to one party with a licence back, every time.

Five: leaving the IP function out of the community agreement. Traditional knowledge permissions, cultural expression licensing, community data custody, and benefit sharing are intellectual property questions that arrive through a social performance channel and get drafted by people whose expertise is elsewhere. The result is agreements that are generous in spirit and unusable in operation — clauses nobody can apply to a specific use, permissions from bodies without authority, and no answer at all to who holds the record after closure.