:: Protection of intellectual property in iPad notes ::

iPad is a secure system which allows access to research notes only with proper permissions. Moreover, all the information entered through iPad is automatically stamped with the current date. However, from the legal standpoint this is insufficient to definitively establish the date and the authorship of intellectual property contained in research notes. We have thoroughly discussed this issue with the head of the Patent Office at Pasteur Institute, and have been able to come up with a solution that is both sufficiently convenient for researchers and sufficiently stringent with respect to the intellectual property law. In particular, once a month researchers will print out and sign those notes which ought to be legally protected (e.g., innovative ideas, important results, etc.). iPad will allow researchers to mark notes for legal protection both at the time of note taking as well as afterwards. Researchers will then paste the signed notes into their paper notebooks, which, once full, will be submitted to the Institute's intellectual property office for storage. Thereby, a legal proof of intellectual property authorship will be established. Also, every month research notes and data will be automatically stored on compact disks and submitted to the intellectual property office. The CDs will be notarized and archived to serve as a legal proof of the date of creation for the intellectual property stored on them.

The CDs will also serve as a useful backup of research information (currently, research information is not properly backed up in many research groups at the Institute). For long-term archival, information on the CDs can either be printed on paper or be transferred, when becomes necessary, to the most current electronic storage medium. CDs are already used by the intellectual property office to store large data that do not easily fit into paper notebooks. Therefore, the issues of CD archiving and notarization are not specific to the usage of iPad.