Christopher George

The IoT presents a challenge to IP practitioners to adapt existing IP protection strategies by developing new approaches better suited to the rapidly changing, connected-yet-disconnected network of innovations forming the IoT. By opening communications and application programming interfaces (APIs) to more and more collaborator-yet-competitor devices, innovators (i.e., clients) must carefully guard their IP while at the same time facilitating interoperability and security among connected devices. Below, we present the adaptation of some existing strategies as well as thoughts on new strategies for IP protection in the interoperable world of the IoT.

As more things (or “smart objects”) are connected to the IoT, more data is collected from them in order to perform analytics to determine trends and associations that lead to insights. For example, an oil well equipped with 20-30 sensors can generate 500,000 data points every 15 seconds20, a jetliner with 6,000 sensors generates 2.5 terabytes of data per day [21], and the more than 46 million smart utility meters installed in the U.S. generate more than 1 billion data points each day. [22] Thus, the term “big data” refers to these large data sets that need to be collected, stored, queried, analyzed and generally managed in order to deliver on the promise of the IoT — insight!