Maritime IP Checklist: Design and Hull Form Protection, Shipyard and Transfer Terms, Classification and Survey Records, Equipment Supply Agreements, and Voyage Data Rights

By Casey Scott McKay · 2025-06-14

A nine-phase working checklist for the intellectual property attaching to vessels, yards, and marine equipment. Phases one and two build the design and rights inventory and select the protection route. Phases three and four fix the shipbuilding contract terms and the classification record position. Phases five and six settle equipment software and voyage data. Phases seven through nine cover brands, transfer and finance, and enforcement readiness. Each phase closes with a gate that should not be passed until the items above it are complete.

IP and Technology > Patent Counseling Transactions | Checklist | Published 14 June 2025 - Updated 16 July 2025 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us

How to use this checklist

This checklist assumes you act for a party with a vessel interest — an owner, a yard, a naval architect, an equipment supplier, a charterer, a manager, or a financier — and that you need to establish, in a defined number of steps, what that party holds and what it should do about it.

The nine phases run in order and each closes with a gate. The gates matter more here than in most checklists, because maritime rights positions are set by four documents written at the beginning of a vessel's life and everything afterwards is archaeology. A phase skipped is a document unread, and an unread document is where the unpleasant surprise lives.

The doctrinal background is in Registered Somewhere Else. The operational treatment, with negotiation guidance and worked engagements, is in Advising a Maritime or Shipbuilding Business. The full cluster is assembled in the Maritime and Shipbuilding IP Toolkit.

Adapt the phases to the party. An owner works phases one through six in order. A yard concentrates on phases one, three, and nine. An equipment supplier lives in phase five. A buyer in a sale and purchase works phase eight first and then backwards.

Phase 1. Build the vessel rights inventory

[ ] Obtain the design agreement, which is a separate document from the shipbuilding contract and is frequently held by a different department or a different company.
[ ] Record whether the design was assigned or licensed, and if licensed, the licensee, the scope, the duration, the territory, and the permitted modifications.
[ ] Establish what was delivered, distinguishing approved general arrangement drawings from the parametric model, the finite element analysis, the calculation files, and the design basis documentation. The first proves what the vessel looks like; the rest allow another one to be built.
[ ] List every software-bearing system on board with its supplier, its version, and its licence reference. A modern commercial hull runs between forty and two hundred.
[ ] Identify who receives data from each system, including automatic vendor telemetry the owner has never logged into.
[ ] Record every mark in use: fleet name, funnel mark, livery, service names, and trading names, with registration status in the jurisdictions actually served rather than the flag state.
[ ] Record the class position: society, notations, survey cycle, and whether the vessel's own technical file is complete or depends on the society's records.
[ ] Note the flag, the registry, the beneficial ownership chain, and the management structure, because each may sit in a different jurisdiction and the difference matters for every question below.
[ ] Identify the charterparty in force and whether it is a time, voyage, or bareboat charter, since the operating party's rights differ fundamentally across the three.
[ ] [Gate] No advice is given on a vessel whose four governing documents — design agreement, shipbuilding contract, equipment schedule, charterparty — have not been read.

Phase 2. Select and execute the design protection route

[ ] Register copyright in significant drawing packages within three months of first publication to preserve statutory damages and fees under 17 U.S.C. § 412, noting that registration is a precondition to suit under 17 U.S.C. § 411 and that completion is governed by Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com.
[ ] Advise accurately on what drawing copyright protects. It reaches copying of the drawings under 17 U.S.C. § 102, not construction of the vessel depicted — the separability logic of Star Athletica, L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands, Inc. applied to a hull.
[ ] Screen for Vessel Hull Design Protection Act registration under 17 U.S.C. § 1301 where the client builds production boats. The right runs ten years; registration must occur within two years of the design being made public; late filing forfeits it entirely.
[ ] Explain why Chapter 13 exists — Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc. preempted state plug-moulding bans — and why it is close to irrelevant for one-off commercial tonnage.
[ ] File design patents on distinctive appearance under 35 U.S.C. § 171 for superstructures, hull profiles, deck fittings, and consoles, applying the ordinary observer test of Egyptian Goddess, Inc. v. Swisa, Inc. and Gorham Manufacturing Co. v. White. See Three Ways to Own a Shape and the Design Patent Checklist.
[ ] Diarise the publication bar. Boat shows, trade press, and sales brochures start the 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) clock, and this sector publicises designs early.
[ ] File utility applications on marine engineering — propulsion, ballast water treatment, scrubbers, mooring, cargo handling — on ordinary 35 U.S.C. § 101, § 102, and § 103 analysis.
[ ] Map filings to the shipbuilding countries, not to a generic major-markets list: Korea, Japan, China, Germany, Italy, Norway, Finland. That is where infringing manufacture occurs.
[ ] Screen software-implemented systems for eligibility under Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International and Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc., claiming the physical implementation rather than the optimisation concept. See What Can Actually Be Patented.
[ ] [Gate] Every design asset has a chosen route, a filing decision, and a recorded reason — including the ones deliberately left unprotected.

Phase 3. Fix the shipbuilding contract terms

[ ] Locate the intellectual property clause in the standard form in use — SAJ, NEWBUILDCON, AWES, CMAC — and read it against the four questions below rather than against the previous project's markup.
[ ] Choose an ownership structure and write it out: yard owns with buyer licensed; buyer owns with yard licensed for reuse; or joint ownership with defined fields. Silence, and "each party retains its background and foreground follows the creator", both fail eighteen months later.
[ ] If joint ownership is chosen, define the fields. The 35 U.S.C. § 262 default lets either owner exploit and licence without accounting, which is almost never intended. See Whose Invention Is It.
[ ] Qualify the buyer's licence five ways: for the life of the vessel, covering operation, maintenance, modification, and repair; exercisable through third-party yards and contractors; surviving the yard's insolvency; transferable to a purchaser; and not conditioned on a continued commercial relationship.
[ ] Settle sister ships explicitly. May the yard build this design again, for whom, how many times, after what interval, and at what price? An owner wanting a competitive advantage should buy exclusivity and expect to pay.
[ ] Allocate improvement ownership. Improvements follow the underlying design; or are owned by their maker with a licence to the other; or are jointly owned with defined use rights. Choose one.
[ ] Specify drawing deliverables by name and format, with native files listed and delivery tied to a payment milestone rather than to completion.
[ ] Flow confidentiality and rights terms down to block subcontractors and systems integrators, or the design has been distributed across a supply chain with no obligations attached.
[ ] Address yard insolvency: surviving licence, progressive or escrowed drawing delivery, and a direct route to the naval architect. See When Your Licensor Goes Bankrupt.
[ ] Check that the refund guarantee is not doing rights work. Money returned is not a design delivered.
[ ] [Gate] The contract answers ownership, reuse, improvements, deliverables, flow-downs, and insolvency in terms a stranger could apply.

Phase 4. Establish the classification and survey record position

[ ] Confirm the client's right of access to its own vessel's file with the society, in writing, before it is needed.
[ ] Establish what transfers on a change of class, which is defined by inter-society agreement rather than by owner preference, and discuss an anticipated transfer with both societies in advance.
[ ] Identify what surveyors see and where it goes, and raise genuinely sensitive proprietary technology before the survey rather than during it.
[ ] Confirm the confidentiality terms in the class agreement and their limits.
[ ] Restrict reproduction of society rules to internal reference. Substantial extracts in client manuals are an infringement risk; the societies enforce.
[ ] Check whether the relevant rule has been incorporated into national regulation, which changes the analysis and brings the merger and government-edicts arguments in The Promise You Made to the Standards Body into play.
[ ] Review marketing use of class notations for accuracy, since misdescription is both a trademark problem and a false advertising exposure under 15 U.S.C. § 1125.
[ ] Keep the vessel's own technical file complete, on the assumption that the society's record will be discoverable, complete, and accurate in any dispute.
[ ] Record cyber notation requirements and confirm the vendor cooperation needed to satisfy them is contracted for.
[ ] [Gate] The client knows what the society holds, what it may obtain, and what it may reproduce.

Phase 5. Negotiate the equipment supply and software terms

[ ] Do this before installation. Every item below is negotiable while the vendor wants the sale and unobtainable afterwards.
[ ] Set licence duration to the life of the vessel, not to a support term, and scope it to the owner, its managers, its charterers, and its crew rather than to a single named purchasing entity.
[ ] Make the licence assignable to a purchaser without consent, or with consent not to be unreasonably withheld and a defined process and timescale.
[ ] Require source code escrow with real release triggers: vendor insolvency, product line discontinuation, failure to support for a defined period, and failure to remedy a critical defect. See the Software Continuity and Escrow Toolkit.
[ ] Verify the escrow deposit rather than assuming it. Verification exercises regularly discover that the deposited material will not build.
[ ] Preserve repair and third-party service rights. Vessels are repaired in whatever yard is nearest, by whatever technician is available. Resist authorised-provider restrictions and vendor-only diagnostic locks. See The Part That Broke and the Aftermarket and Repair IP Checklist.
[ ] Obtain end-of-life commitments: continued information supply, or release of the software, when the product is discontinued.
[ ] Preserve integration and interoperability rights, resisting terms that prohibit interfacing, reverse engineering for compatibility, or connection to third-party monitoring. See Taking It Apart.
[ ] Contract for the cooperation cyber notations require, including update supply and vulnerability disclosure.
[ ] Settle the data rights in the same document, as set out in Phase 6, because the equipment purchase is the moment they are cheapest to obtain.
[ ] If acting for the supplier, invert the analysis. Limit liability, define the support term, state the end-of-life position, and control modification rights, on the assumption that the software will be running unsupported on a hull in an unfamiliar jurisdiction twenty years from now.
[ ] [Gate] Every system on board has a licence that survives sale, survives vendor failure, and permits repair.

Phase 6. Settle the voyage data rights

[ ] List the claimants. Owner, charterer, manager, equipment vendor, class society, flag and port states, and the crew as data subjects. Each has a position; only contract resolves it.
[ ] Write a data clause into the charterparty, the management agreement, and the equipment supply contract, and make the three consistent.
[ ] Categorise the data: operational, technical and condition, commercial and cargo, and personal. They have different owners and different sensitivities.
[ ] Define access — who sees each category, in what form, and with what latency. Real-time and post-voyage access are different commercial propositions.
[ ] Define permitted use, specifically whether the recipient may use the data for its own purposes, aggregate it across vessels, train models on it, or publish benchmarks. These are the terms vendors want and owners rarely notice.
[ ] Define post-termination treatment at redelivery, at sale, and at the end of a support contract: deletion, return, or continued use, and if continued use, in what form.
[ ] Treat the BIMCO electronic data clauses as a floor, not a solution. See Selling Something You Cannot Own and the Data Licensing Checklist.
[ ] Run the privacy analysis on crew data. Voyage data recorder audio captures bridge conversation; monitoring systems track individuals; and a multinational crew on a vessel flagged, owned, managed, and trading in four different jurisdictions presents a genuine transfer question. See The State Privacy Wave and the Biometric Data Checklist where biometric access control is in use.
[ ] Exclude the voyage data recorder from the commercial clause. It is prescribed by SOLAS, its output is casualty evidence, and it is not a commercial asset.
[ ] Identify where the data physically lands, because that jurisdiction — not the high seas — is the useful hook for any data dispute.
[ ] [Gate] Somebody can state, in one sentence per category, who owns the vessel's data and what they may do with it.

Phase 7. Protect the brands and the shore side

[ ] Register fleet and service marks where the client trades, not where it flags. A liner service calling at twelve countries needs protection in twelve countries; see the International Trademark Toolkit.
[ ] Do not mistake vessel name registration for trademark rights. Flag administration registration is identification, not protection.
[ ] Register funnel marks and livery as marks and, where distinctive, as trade dress.
[ ] Run the ordinary portfolio programme — clearance, watching, renewals, and use evidence. See the Trademark Portfolio Management Toolkit.
[ ] Treat shore-side technology as a separate portfolio. Terminal operating systems, crane automation, and port community systems have a logistics profile; see Where the Box Went and the Logistics and Supply Chain Technology IP Toolkit.
[ ] Read the concession agreement where the client operates a terminal, for terms about what it may take with it at the end of the concession — long before the term expires.
[ ] [Gate] The brand register matches the trading map, and the shore-side assets have an owner.

Phase 8. Prepare for sale, purchase, and finance

[ ] Add an intellectual property schedule to the memorandum of agreement listing design licences to be assigned, equipment software licences to be novated, data to be delivered, and marks and livery to be removed, each with a date. It adds a page and removes an entire category of post-closing dispute.
[ ] Confirm the design licence is transferable or obtain a fresh licence from the naval architect before closing.
[ ] Novate the equipment software licences, or the buyer takes delivery of a vessel it is not licensed to operate.
[ ] Arrange the class file transfer with both societies as part of the closing timetable.
[ ] Settle the data history: what the buyer receives, in what form, and subject to what third-party claims from charterers and vendors.
[ ] Diarise repainting and renaming, so the seller's marks do not remain on a hull it no longer controls.
[ ] Confirm conversion and modification freedom under the design terms where the buyer's plan requires it.
[ ] For a financier, confirm three things: the design licence survives enforcement, the equipment licences are assignable on foreclosure, and the technical file follows the vessel. See the IP Due Diligence Toolkit and the IP Security Interests and Financing Toolkit.
[ ] [Gate] The buyer can lawfully operate, maintain, and modify what it is paying for.

Phase 9. Build enforcement readiness

[ ] Start from the territorial rule. Infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271 requires making, using, offering, selling, or importing within the jurisdiction. A vessel in port is within it; a vessel at sea is not.
[ ] Apply the temporary presence exemption correctly. 35 U.S.C. § 272 exempts use in a foreign vessel entering temporarily, provided the invention is used exclusively for the needs of the vessel. Its ancestor is Brown v. Duchesne.
[ ] Test the "needs of the vessel" limit. A cable-layer performing work, a drilling unit producing hydrocarbons, and a factory ship processing catch are not using the invention for the needs of the vessel; they are using it in the business the vessel is in.
[ ] Do not treat the flag as a rights jurisdiction. A Panamanian flag does not carry Panamanian patent law around the world.
[ ] Enforce at the point of manufacture. File and sue where hulls are built and equipment is made; that is where an injunction has practical effect.
[ ] Use the border remedies for imported equipment: recordation and seizure under 19 C.F.R. Part 133, and exclusion proceedings under 19 U.S.C. § 1337. See Section 337 at the ITC and What the Border Asks.
[ ] Note the extraterritorial damages position from WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp., a marine survey dispute, and the limits in Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp..
[ ] Write governing law and arbitration into every agreement, because in a sector this jurisdictionally uncertain, party choice is worth more than litigation strategy. See Deciding It Privately and the IP Arbitration Checklist.
[ ] Build the yard's trade secret record before it is needed. Enumerate construction methods, control access to drawing systems, flow confidentiality down, document exits, and control site visitors — the reasonable measures required under 18 U.S.C. § 1839 for a claim under 18 U.S.C. § 1836. See Building a Trade Secret Program That Survives Litigation and the Trade Secret Protection and Departure Checklist.
[ ] Accept the limits of restrictive covenants in a sector where expertise is regionally concentrated, and rely on documented secrecy discipline instead. See Where an Employee Can Go.
[ ] Screen government and naval work separately for data rights, classification, and export control. See Selling to the Government Without Giving Away the Technology and the Export Control Checklist.
[ ] [Gate] The client knows which forum it would use, against whom, and on what record — before it needs to.

Sector variants: what changes

[ ] Offshore units. Vessels for registration, industrial plant for everything else. Section 272 does not cover production operations; the fabrication yard is the enforcement target. Read with What Comes Out of the Ground.
[ ] Series builders — workboats, tugs, ferries. The design licence and sister ship terms are the central commercial issue rather than an afterthought.
[ ] Superyachts. Confidentiality dominates; designs are marketed as authored works by named designers, raising attribution questions rare elsewhere.
[ ] Naval and government vessels. Data rights, classification, and export control displace commercial analysis entirely.
[ ] Fishing. Gear technology is innovative, rarely protected, and cheaply covered by design registration.
[ ] Research vessels. Funding agreements carry data rights and sometimes public release conditions.
[ ] Passenger operators. Consumer brands with the ordinary advertising and customer data programme attached to a ship. See The Data Behind the Marketing.
[ ] Autonomous and remotely operated vessels. Crowded patent field, training data ownership questions, and a jurisdictionally fixed shore-side operations centre. See The Machine That Decides and the Robotics and Autonomous Systems IP Toolkit.

Common failures this checklist prevents

[ ] The sister ship at a competitor's berth. Prevented by Phase 3.
[ ] The buyer that cannot lawfully run the navigation system. Prevented by Phases 5 and 8.
[ ] The vendor that has been aggregating your fleet's performance data for six years. Prevented by Phase 6.
[ ] The design the naval architect will not release drawings for. Prevented by Phase 1.
[ ] The yard whose methods walked out with a production manager and had never been written down as confidential. Prevented by Phase 9.
[ ] The hull design published at a boat show fourteen months before anyone thought about filing. Prevented by Phase 2.
[ ] The funnel mark still on a vessel sold three years ago. Prevented by Phase 8.
[ ] The charterer that cannot prove underperformance because it never had the data. Prevented by Phase 6.

Three worked applications

The newbuilding programme

A container operator ordering six vessels from a Korean yard with a European naval architect runs Phases 1 through 3 before signing anything, Phase 5 while the equipment specification is open, and Phase 6 before the systems are installed. It buys hull form exclusivity for a defined period in its own trades, secures a licence permitting modification and sister construction at any yard, requires the parametric model tied to a payment milestone, and files design applications on the superstructure before the design is publicised.

Without this, the operator gets six efficient vessels and a competitor gets the seventh.

The yard after a key departure

A yard whose production manager has joined a competitor runs Phase 9 in reverse: does an enumeration exist, were access controls in place, is there an exit record, and what did the individual actually touch? If the answer to the first question is no, the honest advice is that the immediate matter is probably unwinnable and the real work is Phase 9 for next time. Check also whether the methods should have been patented and whether the 35 U.S.C. § 102 grace period has expired.

The charterer denied its own data

A time charterer seeking consumption data to support a performance claim reads the charterparty first — Phase 1 — because many now contain electronic data clauses. If silent, its positions are contractual, practical, and procedural, in that order. The vendor holding the data is not a party and will not assist. The remedy is Phase 6 applied at the next fixture, and this one treated as a lesson with a price.

Party-specific short forms

The nine phases above are the complete programme. Most engagements need a subset, and the subsets differ enough by party that it is worth setting them out.

If you act for the owner

[ ] Phases 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 in that order, with Phase 4 opened at the first special survey and Phase 7 delegated to the brand team with a single instruction: register where we trade.
[ ] Treat Phase 3 as the whole game for a newbuilding. The contract is negotiated once and governs for thirty years.
[ ] Treat Phase 6 as the whole game for an existing fleet, because the data is being generated now, under terms nobody negotiated, and every month of silence is a month of accrued vendor use.
[ ] Keep a single vessel rights file per hull, holding the design agreement, the rights clause of the build contract, the equipment licence schedule, the data clause, and the class access confirmation. Five documents, one folder, findable by somebody who was not there.

If you act for the yard

[ ] Phase 9 first, because construction know-how is the yard's largest asset and the least likely to have been enumerated.
[ ] Phase 3 from the opposite side: reuse rights, improvement ownership, and a drawing delivery obligation that does not hand over the method along with the product.
[ ] Phase 1 as a self-audit. A yard that cannot list what it licensed in, what it developed, and what it owes to whom is negotiating its next contract blind.
[ ] Add subcontractor flow-downs as a standing template item, not a per-project negotiation.
[ ] Add a public funding and export control screen, since shipbuilding is strategically supported in most building countries and the conditions attach quietly.

If you act for the naval architect

[ ] Register the significant designs — Phase 2 — and licence rather than assign wherever the commercial position allows.
[ ] Define the licence by hull count, series, and permitted modification, so that a second yard building a variant is a contractual question rather than an evidentiary one.
[ ] Keep the parametric model, and deliver derived drawings. The model is the practice's compounding asset; the drawings are the deliverable.
[ ] Watch the publication calendar. Design competitions, trade press, and client marketing all publish, and the 35 U.S.C. § 102 and Chapter 13 clocks both start on publication.

If you act for the equipment supplier

[ ] Phase 5, inverted. Every protection the owner seeks is a constraint your client should price rather than refuse outright.
[ ] State the end-of-life position explicitly, because silence becomes an implied obligation to support forever.
[ ] Settle data rights at the sale, which is the only moment the customer is willing to discuss them.
[ ] Assume the software will outlive the company that wrote it and draft the escrow and information provisions accordingly.

If you act for the charterer or manager

[ ] Phase 6 at fixture, not at redelivery.
[ ] Phase 1 to the extent the charterparty gives access, since a bareboat charterer effectively steps into the owner's position and a voyage charterer does not.
[ ] Record what your own systems generate on somebody else's vessel, because a manager's performance database is an asset with an ownership question attached.

If you act for the financier

[ ] Phase 8's three questions only: does the design licence survive enforcement, are the equipment licences assignable on foreclosure, and does the technical file follow the hull.
[ ] Take the answers in writing at closing, since the moment of maximum leverage is before the money moves.

The annual review

Vessel rights positions decay quietly. Vendors change hands, managers change, charterers come and go, and the person who negotiated the build contract retires. An annual review of forty minutes per hull prevents most of the decay.

[ ] Confirm the vessel rights file is still complete and that the five documents are still findable by somebody who was not there when they were signed.
[ ] Re-list the software on board, since retrofits, upgrades, and replacements happen between reviews and arrive with their own terms.
[ ] Check for new vendor telemetry. A system replaced last year may report to a platform nobody approved.
[ ] Reconcile the trading pattern against the trademark register, since new services in new countries appear faster than filings do.
[ ] Confirm design filings are maintained and that renewal and maintenance fees have been paid in every jurisdiction that matters.
[ ] Re-test the class access position after a change of society, a change of manager, or a change of notation.
[ ] Review the charterparty data clause against the current charter, since fixtures change and the last one's terms do not carry forward automatically.
[ ] Record any modification or conversion and confirm it was permitted by the design licence.
[ ] Check whether the vessel is now on a sale list, which converts Phase 8 from a future exercise into a present one.
[ ] [Gate] Nothing in the file is more than twelve months old and unverified.

Documenting the work

The checklist is only as useful as the record it produces. Four artefacts are worth maintaining, and they are worth maintaining in a form a successor can read.

The vessel rights file, one per hull, holding the design agreement, the build contract rights clause, the equipment licence schedule, the data clause, and the class access confirmation.

The fleet software register, one row per system per vessel, with supplier, version, licence reference, transferability, escrow status, and telemetry destination. It is tedious to build and it answers half the questions that ever get asked.

The data map, one page, showing what each vessel generates, who receives it, under what terms, and what happens on termination. If it does not fit on one page it is not being used.

The brand and trading map, one page, showing where the fleet trades against where the marks are registered, with the gaps marked. Gaps are a decision, not an oversight, and the map is where the decision gets recorded.

None of these is complex. All four fit in a shared folder. The reason they rarely exist is that no single department owns the vessel's intellectual property position — the technical department owns the drawings, the commercial department owns the charter, procurement owns the equipment, and legal is consulted after something has gone wrong. The checklist's real function is to name an owner.

A closing note on proportion

Not every vessel warrants this. A single second-hand coaster trading regionally under a bareboat charter needs Phase 1, the transferability items in Phase 5, and nothing else. A series of purpose-built units carrying a proprietary hull form and a bespoke cargo system warrants the whole programme and probably a standing review.

Scale the work to the asset. What does not scale is Phase 1: the four governing documents should be read on every engagement, regardless of size, because the cost of reading them is an hour and the cost of not reading them is discovered years later, usually by somebody else, usually at the worst possible moment.

Five questions to open every file with

[ ] Who drew it, and what did they keep? Determines whether the client may modify, repair, or replicate.
[ ] What software is on board, and under whose licence? Determines whether the client may lawfully operate what it owns.
[ ] Where does the data go? Determines who is building a competing asset out of the client's operations.
[ ] Where do we trade, and where are we registered? Determines whether the brand is protected where it is used.
[ ] What happens to all of this if the yard fails, the vendor discontinues, or the vessel is sold? Determines whether the position is durable or merely current.

Five questions, answerable in an afternoon, resolving most of what goes wrong in this sector.

Key Authorities at a Glance

The maritime practitioner draws on four bodies of law that rarely meet. Patent territoriality is set by 35 U.S.C. § 271 and qualified for vessels by 35 U.S.C. § 272, whose ancestor Brown v. Duchesne still decides port-call questions. The extraterritorial boundary comes from Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp. and, for damages, from WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp..

Copyright supplies drawing protection at 17 U.S.C. § 102, limited by the separability reasoning of Star Athletica, L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands, Inc. and by the idea-expression line of Baker v. Selden, with the registration prerequisites of 17 U.S.C. § 411, § 412, and Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com. The sui generis hull right at 17 U.S.C. § 1301 exists because Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc. preempted state plug-moulding bans. Designs run through 35 U.S.C. § 171, Egyptian Goddess, Inc. v. Swisa, Inc., and Gorham Manufacturing Co. v. White. Trade secrecy runs through 18 U.S.C. § 1836 and § 1839, Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp., and E.I. duPont deNemours & Co. v. Christopher, whose facts translate directly to an open building dock.

| Authority | Checklist phase | | --- | --- | | 35 U.S.C. § 271 | Phase 9 — territorial infringement | | 35 U.S.C. § 272 | Phase 9 — temporary presence exemption | | Brown v. Duchesne | Phase 9 — origin of the vessel exemption | | Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp. | Phase 9 — extraterritorial limits | | WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp. | Phase 9 — foreign lost profits | | 17 U.S.C. § 102 | Phase 2 — copyright in drawings | | Star Athletica, L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands, Inc. | Phase 2 — separability and the useful article | | Baker v. Selden | Phase 2 — idea and expression in technical works | | 17 U.S.C. § 411 | Phase 2 — registration as a precondition to suit | | 17 U.S.C. § 412 | Phase 2 — timely registration and statutory damages | | Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com | Phase 2 — when registration is complete | | 17 U.S.C. § 1301 | Phase 2 — Vessel Hull Design Protection Act | | Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc. | Phase 2 — why Chapter 13 exists | | 35 U.S.C. § 171 | Phase 2 — design patents on appearance | | Egyptian Goddess, Inc. v. Swisa, Inc. | Phase 2 — ordinary observer test | | Gorham Manufacturing Co. v. White | Phase 2 — the original formulation | | 35 U.S.C. § 101 | Phase 2 — eligibility of marine systems | | Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International | Phase 2 — eligibility screen on optimisation software | | Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories, Inc. | Phase 2 — the two-step framework | | 35 U.S.C. § 102 | Phase 2 — boat show and trade press bars | | 35 U.S.C. § 103 | Phase 2 — obviousness in incremental engineering | | 35 U.S.C. § 262 | Phase 3 — joint ownership default | | 18 U.S.C. § 1836 | Phase 9 — federal trade secret claim | | 18 U.S.C. § 1839 | Phase 9 — reasonable measures | | Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp. | Phase 9 — secrecy alongside patenting | | E.I. duPont deNemours & Co. v. Christopher | Phase 9 — improper means at an open site | | 15 U.S.C. § 1125 | Phases 4 and 7 — false class claims and livery | | 19 U.S.C. § 1337 | Phase 9 — import exclusion | | 19 C.F.R. Part 133 | Phase 9 — customs recordation and seizure |

Further reading is collected at vessel hull design protection, shipbuilding contract intellectual property, classification society records, charterparty data clause, and section 272 temporary presence.