4. Legal aspects of collaborative design

4.1 Intellectual property

The creation of a CAD model of a sub-assembly requires an investment based on know-how, and often results in an innovative solution. Diffusing this investment from the company, by transferring models to its customer or partner and, more generally, outside the company, can lead to spoliation of this intellectual property, which needs to be protected.

A first measure of protection is to ensure that the client or partner is satisfied with a "dead" model, i.e., one that has been purged of its embedded intelligence (the design rules used to create the model). A standardized format (ISO 10303, known as STEP) meets this need. It should be noted that this format is also an answer to the difficult question of long-term archiving.

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