Space and Satellite IP Checklist: Registry and Jurisdiction, Payload and Instrument Rights, Launch and Hosted Terms, Data Licensing, and Export Screening

By Casey Scott McKay · 2023-10-26

This checklist audits a space or satellite business in the order the questions actually arise, beginning with export classification and registration because those determinations govern who may work on the technology and whose law applies to the asset in orbit. It then works through a portfolio review that tests whether claims are enforceable anywhere a court can reach, the launch and hosted payload agreements whose cross-waivers can swallow an infringement claim, the remote sensing licence conditions that shape a data product before any private right arises, and the data licence terms that decide whether analytics customers become a downstream market or a competitor. It covers ground segment software and open source, supplier qualification heritage and re-sourcing cost, the publication and spectrum coordination calendars, and the investor diligence file. Gate items mark where work should stop.

IP and Technology > Patent Counseling Transactions | Checklist | Published 26 October 2023 - Updated 7 February 2026 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us

Summary. This checklist audits a space or satellite business in the order the questions arise, beginning with export classification and registration because they govern who may work on the technology and whose law applies in orbit. It works through a portfolio review testing whether claims are enforceable anywhere a court can reach, the launch and hosted payload agreements whose cross-waivers can swallow an infringement claim, the remote sensing licence conditions that shape a data product before any private right arises, and the data licence terms that decide whether analytics customers become a downstream market or a competitor. Gate items mark where work should stop.

Keywords: space IP checklist · export classification · registry jurisdiction · section 105 · terrestrial claims · divided infringement · launch cross-waiver · hosted payload rights · remote sensing licence conditions · derived products · ground segment software · qualification heritage · publication review · spectrum coordination · investor 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. Registration | Whose law applies to the asset | Regulatory and counsel | Position recorded per asset | | 3. Portfolio | Whether claims reach anything | Counsel with the bench | No space-only portfolio | | 4. Launch and hosting | What the waiver actually waived | Contracts and counsel | IP carve-out confirmed | | 5. Remote sensing licence | What may be imaged and sold | Regulatory and product | Conditions read before roadmap fixed | | 6. Data licensing | Whether customers become competitors | Commercial and counsel | Derived products term drafted | | 7. Ground software | Whether the stack is owned | Engineering and counsel | Bill of materials per release | | 8. Suppliers | Whether the constellation can be replenished | Procurement and counsel | Re-sourcing cost recorded | | 9. Publication | Whether options survive the science | Counsel with research leads | Filing before submission | | 10. Diligence | Whether the business can be financed | Counsel | Eight answers assembled |

The matter. An imaging startup has flown three demonstration satellites, manufactures buses domestically, sources its optical payload from a foreign supplier, launches on rideshare, downlinks through a third-party ground network, and sells change-detection analytics. The founders came from a university programme. Nobody has produced a written export classification. The data licence template was adapted from a software agreement. A Series B investor with foreign limited partners has asked for technical diligence next month.

Phase 1. Classify before anything moves

[ ] Determine jurisdiction per item. Munitions list or Commerce Control List, noting that a reform moved many commercial satellite items to the commerce side while remote sensing payloads, certain propulsion, and defence-related systems remained on the munitions list.
[ ] Apply missile technology controls where launch vehicles or their components are involved, because the licensing posture is markedly more restrictive than ordinary dual-use treatment.
[ ] Classify technical data separately from hardware, since data carries its own status and may be controlled where the item is not.
[ ] Record the determination in writing with its basis, and obtain a formal ruling where the answer is genuinely uncertain.
[ ] Map the deemed export exposure: distributed engineering teams, foreign investors conducting technical diligence, international academic collaborators, visiting customers, and foreign patent associates.
- Trap. Technical diligence by a prospective investor is a disclosure, and in this sector it is the disclosure most likely to be made without screening.
[ ] Build one access architecture — segregated repositories, role and nationality permissions, screening at hire and onboarding, marking at creation, visitor controls, and an access register — which satisfies export control and supplies the reasonable measures evidence 18 U.S.C. § 1839 requires.
[ ] Check every pending application for the foreign filing licence requirement in 35 U.S.C. § 184, because 35 U.S.C. § 185 makes an unlicensed foreign filing a ground of invalidity.
[ ] Screen for secrecy order exposure under 35 U.S.C. § 181.
[ ] Anticipate foreign investment screening, which examines technology transfer specifically in this sector and can condition or block a round.
[ ] [Gate] No hire, transfer, diligence disclosure, or foreign filing before the written determination exists.

Phase 2. Fix registration and jurisdiction per asset

[ ] Identify the launching state for each satellite under the Registration Convention, and confirm which state has actually filed the registration.
- Why. Article VIII of the Outer Space Treaty gives the state of registry jurisdiction and control over the object and over personnel aboard it, which is the hinge on which every question about applicable law in orbit turns.
[ ] Confirm the 35 U.S.C. § 105 position for each asset: the statute treats an object carried on a spacecraft under United States jurisdiction and control as within the United States for patent purposes, subject to an international-agreement exception and a registration exception for objects carried on the registry of a foreign state.
[ ] Record the registry position in the technical file, not only in the regulatory file, because the patent analysis depends on it and the two files are usually kept by different people.
- Trap. A rideshare arrangement can put a payload on a bus registered to a different state than the one the payload owner assumes, and nobody notices until enforcement.
[ ] Re-run the analysis after any change of control: an in-orbit transfer, a bus operator change, a constellation acquisition, or a re-registration all move the answer.
[ ] Check the launch and hosting agreements for any clause purporting to fix registration, and confirm the clause matches what was actually filed.
[ ] Document the ground segment jurisdiction separately, because the terrestrial half of the system is where the enforceable claims will usually live.
[ ] [Gate] Every flight asset has a written registry and jurisdiction position before the portfolio review starts.

Phase 3. Audit the portfolio for reach

[ ] Classify every claim as space-side (practised only on the flight asset), ground-side (practised on terrestrial infrastructure), or split across both.
[ ] Flag every split claim as an enforcement problem and plan a continuation that recites the ground element alone.
- Why. A claim requiring steps performed in orbit and steps performed on the ground faces both the territorial question and the divided-infringement question at once, and the second is hard enough on its own after Limelight Networks, Inc. v. Akamai Technologies, Inc. and the direction-or-control framework the Federal Circuit developed on remand.
[ ] Confirm that ground-side coverage exists for every commercially important function: tasking and scheduling, downlink handling, calibration, atmospheric correction, mosaicking, change detection, product generation, and delivery.
[ ] Run eligibility discipline on the ground claims against 35 U.S.C. § 101 and Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, because processing and analytics claims drift toward abstraction quickly.
- Trap. The most valuable claims in an imaging company are usually the analytics claims, and they are the ones most exposed on eligibility.
[ ] Test written description and enablement on claims whose support comes from a single demonstration mission, applying 35 U.S.C. § 112 and Amgen Inc. v. Sanofi to any functional breadth.
[ ] Check the 35 U.S.C. § 102 exposure from conference papers, mission descriptions, agency abstracts, and grant reports.
[ ] Confirm inventorship for every application on which a former academic collaborator contributed, and check the institutional agreement.
[ ] Identify what should stay a trade secret: calibration coefficients, correction models, tasking heuristics, and thermal design margins are typically better protected as secrets than as published claims, and Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp. confirms the choice is legitimate.
[ ] [Gate] No portfolio may consist only of space-side claims. If the audit finds one, the continuation programme starts before anything else.

Phase 4. Read the launch, rideshare, and hosting agreements

[ ] Locate the cross-waiver and read its scope word by word.
- Why. Launch cross-waivers derive from the statutory framework at 51 U.S.C. § 50914 and are drafted for liability arising from launch activity; commercial drafting frequently sweeps wider than that, and a waiver of "all claims arising out of the launch services" can be read to reach an infringement claim between participants.
[ ] Confirm an express intellectual property carve-out in the waiver, and check that it extends to the participant's affiliates and to claims arising after separation.
[ ] Extend the carve-out down the chain to subcontractors and other rideshare customers, whose waivers may be flowed through in a form the payload owner never saw.
- Trap. The rideshare customer signs with the aggregator, the aggregator signs with the launch provider, and the waiver that binds the customer is the one three documents down.
[ ] In hosted payload arrangements, allocate ownership of everything the integration generates: interface designs, thermal models, vibration data, mounting hardware, and command sequences.
[ ] Address whether the host may replicate the interface for a competing payload, which is the single term most often left silent.
[ ] Handle telemetry ownership explicitly, since the host's telemetry describes the payload's behaviour and is a competitive asset.
[ ] Fix the mission data ownership: who owns the raw downlink, who may retain it, for how long, and whether the host may use it to improve its own systems.
[ ] Check anomaly investigation clauses for disclosure obligations that would push protected design information to a party with an adverse interest.
[ ] Confirm the export posture of every disclosure the agreement contemplates, including anomaly review and integration support.
[ ] [Gate] No launch or hosting agreement is signed without a written IP carve-out and a named owner for integration work product.

Reading a cross-waiver properly

[ ] Separate the three layers the waiver operates on. The first is the statutory reciprocal waiver the launch licensee is required to obtain, which addresses damage arising from launch activity. The second is the contractual waiver between the launch provider and its direct customer, which is negotiated and usually broader. The third is the flow-down each customer signs with an aggregator or integrator, which is where the language is least examined and most dangerous. A carve-out in the second layer that does not appear in the third protects nothing.
[ ] Test the waiver against a concrete hypothetical. Assume a co-manifested payload from a competitor is later found to practise a claim you own, and that the practising happened on orbit after separation. Ask whether the waiver as drafted bars the claim. If two careful readers disagree, the clause needs amendment, not interpretation.
[ ] Watch for waivers that survive the agreement. A waiver expressed to apply to claims "arising out of or relating to the launch services" and stated to survive termination can be argued to reach conduct years later. Bound it in time where the counterparty will accept a bound.
[ ] Check the definition of "participant." Many waivers define the term to include customers of customers, subcontractors at every tier, and affiliates. That definition is what converts a bilateral waiver into a multilateral one, and it is the definition that determines whom you can never sue.
- Trap. A constellation operator that flies on the same vehicle as a direct competitor twice a year may, over five years, have waived claims against most of its addressable adversaries without ever having considered the question.
[ ] Preserve claims against non-participants expressly. Nothing in the arrangement should be readable as a waiver against a ground-segment competitor who had no role in the launch.

Hosted payload terms worth naming individually

[ ] Interface control documents. Name the owner. These describe the mechanical, thermal, electrical, and data interface, and they are the most reusable artefact the integration produces.
[ ] Command and telemetry dictionaries. These describe how the payload is operated and what it reports, and they are close to a functional specification.
[ ] Thermal and structural models. Frequently generated by the host using payload data, and frequently claimed by the host as its own work product.
[ ] Test and qualification data. The heritage record. Whoever holds it controls whether the payload can be flown elsewhere.
[ ] Anomaly reports. Sensitive on both sides, and the category most likely to be shared with a third-party investigator without an export screen.
[ ] Ground software adaptations. The host's ground system will usually be modified to accommodate the payload, and those modifications encode payload behaviour.

Phase 5. Read the remote sensing licence before fixing the roadmap

[ ] Obtain the operating licence and read the conditions, which is a step the product team almost never performs.
- Why. A private remote sensing licence issued under the framework at 51 U.S.C. § 60121 may carry resolution limits, shutter control provisions, restrictions on imaging particular areas, data retention duties, and obligations to make data available to the government on terms the licensee did not negotiate.
[ ] Map each condition to a product feature and mark the features that cannot be built as designed.
[ ] Identify any condition that forces disclosure of imagery or derived data, and assess what that does to a trade secret position in the correction and calibration chain.
[ ] Check whether the licence tier can be changed and what a change would cost in time.
[ ] Confirm the launch licence position under 51 U.S.C. § 50901 if the business operates or contracts for launch.
[ ] Verify spectrum authorisation for every downlink and uplink band, and check the coordination status of any band shared with terrestrial services.
[ ] Record the orbital debris and disposal commitments, which increasingly carry design consequences.
[ ] [Gate] The product roadmap is not fixed until the licence conditions have been mapped to features in writing.

Spectrum and coordination, briefly

[ ] Confirm the authorisation for every band actually used, including telemetry, tracking and command, payload downlink, and any inter-satellite link. Operators routinely add an inter-satellite link during development and forget that it needs its own authorisation.
[ ] Check the international coordination status of any band shared with terrestrial or other satellite services, because coordination determines whether the assignment is protected against interference or merely permitted on a non-interference basis.
[ ] Record milestone and bring-into-use deadlines attached to any filing, since losing a filing to a missed milestone destroys an asset that took years to obtain.
[ ] Understand that spectrum rights are not intellectual property and cannot be sold, licensed, or pledged in the same way, but that they nonetheless appear on the diligence list and are frequently the constraint that determines constellation architecture.
- Trap. A financing model that assumes a downlink capacity the authorisation does not support is a model that will be revised after the term sheet.

Phase 6. Rebuild the data licence around derived products

[ ] Stop using the software licence template. Imagery and analytics licensing turns on questions a software template does not ask.
[ ] Define the licensed item precisely: scene, product level, time window, area of interest, and whether the licence covers a single delivery or a subscription.
[ ] Distinguish raw, processed, and derived product with definitions a reader can apply without argument.
- Why. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. means the underlying observation is not owned; the selection, arrangement, and processing may be, and the licence has to be drafted knowing that the customer can extract facts.
[ ] Write the derived products term as a business decision, not boilerplate. Options range from full customer ownership, through a licence back, to a prohibition on redistributing derived layers.
- Trap. A customer who can build and resell a change-detection layer from the imagery becomes a competitor holding the higher-margin position.
[ ] Cap the extraction volume or the retention period where the licence is not intended to permit corpus building.
[ ] Address machine learning training explicitly, because silence is now read as permission by sophisticated customers.
[ ] Handle publication and attribution, especially for academic customers whose grant terms require open deposit.
[ ] Add a downstream compliance term flowing the licence conditions to sublicensees.
[ ] Include audit rights proportionate to the deal, with a defined trigger.
[ ] Confirm the licence does not conflict with any government data rights obligation carried by the underlying development.
[ ] [Gate] No data licence issues before the derived products term has been decided by someone with commercial authority.

Drafting the derived products term

Three drafting positions cover most deals, and naming them makes the negotiation shorter.

Position one: customer owns derived products outright. Appropriate where the customer is an end user with no distribution ambition — a government agency, an insurer, an agricultural cooperative analysing its own fields. The licensor keeps the imagery business and gives away nothing it was going to sell.

Position two: customer owns derived products, licensor takes a licence back. Appropriate where the customer's analytics are genuinely its own contribution but the licensor wants the option to serve similar customers with similar layers. The licence back should be non-exclusive, royalty-free, and limited to internal use and product improvement unless a broader grant is paid for.

Position three: customer may use derived products internally but may not distribute them. Appropriate where the customer sits in the licensor's addressable market. This is the position most likely to be resisted, and it is the position most likely to be worth insisting on, because a customer who can resell a derived layer is a reseller of the licensor's product at a margin the licensor does not capture.

Whichever position is taken, the definition of "derived product" has to be operable. A definition that turns on whether the output "incorporates" the imagery invites argument, because a change-detection mask incorporates nothing but was computed from everything. Definitions that work in practice describe the output by reference to what it enables: a product that permits the recipient to answer a question the imagery answers is derived, whether or not any pixel survives.

[ ] Choose one of the three positions per customer segment rather than negotiating each deal from scratch.
[ ] Write the definition so a non-lawyer can apply it to a specific output.
[ ] State the treatment of aggregate and statistical outputs separately, since those are usually the least sensitive and blanket prohibitions on them cost goodwill for no benefit.

Phase 7. Own the ground segment stack

[ ] Produce a bill of materials for every release of tasking, scheduling, processing, and delivery software.
[ ] Identify every copyleft component and determine whether the distribution trigger is met, including through appliance delivery to customers.
[ ] Check scientific and agency-derived code for licence terms and for provenance.
- Why. Federal government works are outside copyright under 17 U.S.C. § 105, which makes agency code attractive, but contractor-authored code delivered to an agency is not automatically in that category and may carry its own restrictions.
[ ] Record the provenance of every calibration and correction dataset, including agency products, published coefficients, and third-party reference data.
[ ] Confirm assignment from every contributor, including interns, research collaborators, and contractors.
[ ] Check any government-funded component for Bayh-Dole obligations under 35 U.S.C. § 202, including the election and reporting duties, the government licence, and march-in exposure.
[ ] Screen defence-related deliveries for the data rights legends required under 48 C.F.R. § 252.227-7013, and confirm the legends were actually applied at delivery.
- Trap. Unlimited rights arise by default where a legend was omitted, and the omission is usually discovered years later during a re-compete.
[ ] [Gate] No release ships without a current bill of materials and a resolved copyleft position.

Provenance questions the bill of materials must answer

[ ] For each component, record the source, the licence, the version, and the date it entered the build. A bill of materials that names components without versions cannot support a copyleft determination, because the licence on a component frequently changes between releases.
[ ] Record the distribution mode for each release. Copyleft obligations turn on whether the software is conveyed, and a hosted service, an appliance shipped to a customer's ground station, and a downloadable processing tool sit in three different positions.
- Trap. Ground segment software is often delivered as an appliance to defence or government customers precisely because the network is closed, and that delivery is a conveyance even though the commercial product is a service.
[ ] Trace every scientific library to a named licence file, not to a project website. Academic and agency-adjacent code frequently carries a licence written by a research group rather than a lawyer, with terms that are neither permissive nor copyleft in any recognised sense.
[ ] Check for field-of-use restrictions in research code, particularly non-commercial and research-only terms that a commercial imaging product violates on its first sale.
[ ] Record the provenance of reference datasets separately from code. Digital elevation models, atmospheric profiles, orbital catalogues, spectral libraries, and ground control points all carry terms, and several widely used products restrict redistribution of derived layers.
[ ] Identify anything derived from a customer's data and confirm that the licence permitted the derivation.

Government-funded components

[ ] Determine the funding source for every subject invention and confirm that disclosure to the agency happened within the statutory window.
[ ] Confirm the election of title was made and recorded, because failure to elect is one of the few ways a company loses title by inaction.
[ ] Record the scope of the government licence, which is worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, and paid-up, and explain to the commercial team what it does and does not permit.
[ ] Assess march-in exposure honestly rather than dismissing it, particularly where the funded technology underpins a service the agency itself procures.
[ ] Check the domestic manufacture preference where products embodying a subject invention are sold in the United States, and confirm whether a waiver was obtained.
[ ] Reconcile Bayh-Dole obligations against the data rights framework if the same technology is also delivered under a defence contract, because the two regimes address different objects and both can apply to one programme.

Phase 8. Qualify suppliers and price the re-sourcing risk

[ ] List every flight-critical component and identify whether it has a qualified second source.
[ ] Record the qualification cost and schedule for each single-sourced item, in months and in dollars, because that number is the supplier's real leverage.
- Why. Heritage is the currency of the sector: a component that has flown is worth more than a technically equivalent component that has not, which means a supplier who supplies the flown part holds a position no contract term alone can dislodge.
[ ] Read the supplier terms for ownership of improvements generated during qualification and integration, and confirm the buyer owns or licenses what its own engineers contributed.
[ ] Check for exclusivity or field restrictions that would prevent the supplier from selling to competitors, and price them honestly.
[ ] Confirm the supplier's own IP position in the component, particularly where the supplier is itself dependent on a sub-tier source.
[ ] Obtain escrow or continuity provisions for firmware, test procedures, and qualification data.
[ ] Check assignment and change-of-control terms, since consolidation in this supply base is constant.
[ ] Screen the supplier for export and sanctions exposure and record the screening date.
[ ] Confirm that qualification data may be retained after the relationship ends, which is what makes re-sourcing possible.
[ ] [Gate] Every single-sourced flight-critical item has a written re-sourcing cost and a continuity provision.

Phase 9. Run the publication and disclosure calendar

[ ] Identify every scheduled disclosure for the next twelve months: conference papers, mission descriptions, agency reports, grant deliverables, investor materials, and trade show demonstrations.
[ ] Route each through a review that asks three questions: does it disclose a claimable invention, does it disclose a trade secret, and is it an export.
[ ] File before submission, not before presentation, because submission to a reviewed venue is itself a disclosure event to be treated conservatively.
- Trap. Researchers reliably report the conference date and not the submission date, and the gap is usually four to six months.
[ ] Confirm the foreign filing licence before any application is filed abroad, per 35 U.S.C. § 184.
[ ] Check whether the grace period in 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) is even available for the jurisdictions that matter commercially, because most are absolute-novelty regimes.
[ ] Review agency reporting obligations for any federally funded work, including invention disclosure deadlines whose breach forfeits title.
[ ] Coordinate with the marketing calendar, since product announcements are disclosures too.
[ ] [Gate] Nothing is submitted, presented, or published without a completed review record.

Phase 10. Assemble the diligence file

[ ] Answer, in writing, the eight questions a technical investor will ask. Where is the technology classified. Who owns the payload design. What does the launch waiver waive. Which claims are enforceable on the ground. What does the remote sensing licence permit. Who owns customer-derived products. What is in the ground software stack. What would re-sourcing the critical component cost.
[ ] Assemble supporting documents for each answer rather than relying on a summary memorandum.
[ ] Structure the data room to permit staged access so that controlled technical data is not disclosed to an unscreened reviewer.
- Why. Foreign investment screening looks specifically at technology transfer in this sector, and an unmanaged diligence process creates both an export problem and a screening problem.
[ ] Record the chain of title for every application, including the university assignments.
[ ] Produce the encumbrance list: government licences, march-in exposure, field restrictions, exclusivity commitments, and security interests.
[ ] Confirm that no application is subject to a secrecy order under 35 U.S.C. § 181 that has not been disclosed.
[ ] Verify the trade secret evidence file exists and is current: policies, marking, access logs, and exit interviews sufficient to satisfy 18 U.S.C. § 1839.
[ ] [Gate] The file is complete when all eight answers are supported by documents, not assertions.

A note on sequencing

The order of these phases is not arbitrary, and running them out of order is the most common way a competent team wastes a quarter. Classification comes first because it constrains who may participate in every later step: an unclassified programme cannot safely staff an engineering team, cannot conduct investor diligence, and cannot instruct foreign counsel. Registration comes second because the patent analysis in Phase 3 is unanswerable without it — a portfolio review that does not know the registry position is reviewing claims whose territorial status is unknown.

The launch and hosting review comes before the licence review because the contracts are negotiated earlier in a programme than the operating licence is granted, and a carve-out that was not obtained cannot be obtained retroactively. The licence review comes before the data licensing work because the licence conditions constrain what may be sold at all, and drafting a commercial agreement around a product that cannot lawfully ship is wasted drafting.

Ground software and suppliers come next because they are the phases most likely to surface a problem that requires engineering time to fix, and engineering time has to be scheduled. The publication calendar is placed late not because it matters less but because it is continuous: once established, it runs indefinitely, and it is better established after the team understands which disclosures carry which consequences.

The diligence file is last because it is a compilation. Every answer in it is produced by an earlier phase. A team that tries to build the file first will produce a document full of assertions it cannot support, which is worse than no document at all, because an investor who finds one unsupported assertion will discount the rest.

What "done" looks like

A team that has completed this checklist can produce, on a day's notice, a written export classification with its basis, a registry position for each flight asset, a claim map distinguishing space-side from ground-side coverage, the executed launch and hosting agreements with their IP carve-outs highlighted, the operating licence with its conditions mapped to product features, the current data licence template with a reasoned derived-products term, a bill of materials for the current ground software release, a re-sourcing cost for every single-sourced flight-critical component, a publication review log, and a chain-of-title record for every application. That is ten artefacts. None of them is exotic, and a business that has all ten is unusual.

Outcome. A business that has run this checklist can tell an investor which of its assets are registered where, which of its claims reach a defendant a court can serve, what its launch waiver actually gave away, and whether its analytics customers are permitted to become its competitors. None of those answers is available from the technical file alone, and all four are asked in the first diligence session.

Key Authorities at a Glance

| Authority | What it settles | Where it bites in this checklist | |---|---|---| | 35 U.S.C. § 105 | Inventions made, used, or sold on a spacecraft under US jurisdiction and control are treated as within the United States, subject to agreement and registry exceptions | Phase 2 registry position; Phase 3 claim classification | | Outer Space Treaty art. VIII and the Registration Convention | The state of registry retains jurisdiction and control over the object | Phase 2; why the registry filing governs the analysis | | 51 U.S.C. § 60121 | Private remote sensing operations require a licence and carry conditions | Phase 5 licence conditions mapped to features | | 51 U.S.C. § 50901 | Commercial launch licensing framework | Phase 5 launch posture | | 51 U.S.C. § 50914 | Statutory cross-waiver framework for launch participants | Phase 4; the waiver is for launch liability, not for infringement | | Limelight Networks, Inc. v. Akamai Technologies, Inc. | No induced infringement without a single direct infringer | Phase 3 split-claim flagging | | Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International | Two-step eligibility framework | Phase 3 eligibility discipline on analytics claims | | Amgen Inc. v. Sanofi | Functional breadth must be enabled across the full scope | Phase 3 single-mission support | | Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. | Facts are not copyrightable; only original selection and arrangement | Phase 6 raw versus derived product | | Kewanee Oil Co. v. Bicron Corp. | Trade secret protection coexists with the patent system | Phase 3 calibration and correction as secrets | | 18 U.S.C. § 1839 | Reasonable measures are an element of trade secret status | Phase 1 access architecture; Phase 10 evidence file | | 35 U.S.C. § 184 and § 185 | Foreign filing licence requirement and the invalidity consequence | Phase 1 and Phase 9 | | 35 U.S.C. § 181 | Secrecy orders on applications with national security implications | Phase 1 screening; Phase 10 disclosure | | 35 U.S.C. § 202 | Bayh-Dole election, government licence, and march-in | Phase 7 funded components; Phase 10 encumbrances | | 48 C.F.R. § 252.227-7013 | Technical data rights categories and marking | Phase 7 legends at delivery | | 35 U.S.C. § 112 | Written description and enablement | Phase 3 breadth testing | | 35 U.S.C. § 101 | Patent eligibility | Phase 3 ground-claim screening | | 35 U.S.C. § 102 | Novelty and the grace period | Phase 3 and Phase 9 | | 17 U.S.C. § 105 | Federal government works are outside copyright | Phase 7 agency-derived code |

The five things people get wrong

One: treating the registry as a regulatory detail. The registration filing is not paperwork. It determines which state has jurisdiction and control over the object, which in turn determines whether 35 U.S.C. § 105 treats the asset as domestic. A team that cannot say which state registered its satellite cannot answer the first question an enforcement analysis asks. Record it per asset, in the technical file, and re-check it after any change of control.

Two: assuming the launch cross-waiver stops at launch liability. It very often does not, as drafted. The statutory framework contemplates a waiver of liability claims among participants; the commercial paper frequently uses language broad enough to reach an infringement claim between the payload owner and a co-manifested competitor. The carve-out has to be express, and it has to flow through the aggregator to every participant whose paper binds you.

Three: building a portfolio that only reads on things in orbit. A space-side claim is a claim against a defendant a court cannot easily reach, practised on an object whose registry may not be what you assume, proved by evidence you would have to obtain from a spacecraft. The commercially enforceable claims in almost every space business are the ground claims — tasking, downlink processing, correction, analytics, delivery. Build them deliberately, and screen them for eligibility, because that is where they are vulnerable.

Four: licensing data with a software template. A software licence asks whether the customer may copy, modify, and redistribute code. A data licence has to ask what the customer may build from the observations, whether that thing competes with the licensor, and who owns it. Feist guarantees that the underlying facts are extractable. The derived products term is therefore the whole negotiation, and it is a commercial decision that should not be made by whoever last edited the template.

Five: discovering the remote sensing licence conditions after the roadmap is fixed. The conditions attached to an operating licence can restrict resolution, imaging targets, retention, and distribution, and they bind before any private right arises. A roadmap built without reading them will contain features that cannot lawfully ship. Read the licence first, map each condition to a feature, and let the product team see the constraints while they are still cheap to design around.