Protecting secret technology

Trade secrets and intellectual property are where value lies in the motor industry these days, according to a rather inconsequential article which seems to have been reposted from the New Tork Times. Noting that electric and hybrid vehicles require a lot of new technology, and that three senior Renault executives were fired not long ago for leaking secret information (to what it calls an "organised international network", whatever that means), the article makes the far-from-startling point that intellectual property is important to the motor industry. To be fair, it says it always has been: which gives me an opportunity to mention, arbitrarily, Nichols Advanced Vehicle Systems Inc & Ors v Rees, Oliver & Ors [1979] RPC 127 - as a motor racing fan, perhaps my earliest knowledge of the importance and power of intellectual property.

The novelty is that it's not just mechanical intellectual property - an issue in the motor industry ever since Otto's patents for the four-stroke cycle were held invalid over de Rochas's earlier patents - but another of the three areas into which patent attorneys divide their world, electronics (the third being, I believe, chemistry - broad interpretations are needed). In particular, it's the software that controls modern vehicles, which has been present for many years but which is a whole new ball game now that cars run on stuff other than fossil fuels:

The Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid, for example, uses about 10 million lines of computer code to shunt power among the car's battery pack, power inverter, drive motor, gas engine, generator and other subsystems. By comparison, Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner relies on a mere 8 million lines of code.

That statistic strikes me as interesting - but the most likely effect it will have on my mind is to make me wonder about flying by Dreamliner. Should I be reassured that Boeing haven't relied more on electronics, should I be impressed by the economy of their coding, or should I be worried that they might not have put enough computer code in?

The article goes on, in what appears to be a colossal non-sequitur:

"It's a little like the wild, wild West right now," said Jon Lauckner, president of General Motors Ventures, the automaker's new venture capital group.

Not, perhaps, in Europe, though, where at least the Commission is aware of the implications of restrictions on the availability of technical information - and have been trying, through the medium of the block exemption, to do something about it, for years. I wonder whether we are moving into a new phase, in which the car makers argue that all that good stuff about technical information is now old hat as it moves from the field of diagnostics to a central place in the way vehicles work - demanding the strongest possible protection?