Consortia generally improve the ability of defence companies to participate in more complex and large-scale projects. However, an adequate intellectual life license and a specific legal framework are required to ensure the success and sustainability of the consortium. In the case of projects involving full data processing and use, consortium members should be more careful to avoid legal problems related to breaches of secrecy or unenforceable data licenses. Given the diversity of IP rights regulations, it is important to know how local laws deal with moral rights, staff inventions and licensing and IP rights transfer. In addition, it is essential, for the success of a consortium, to develop a balanced license, but also appropriate, for the background and foreground ip. In Germany, for example, data ownership is generally correlated with physical ownership and control of the data storage unit (s). As a result, the granting of data licences under German law is not applicable and leads to several problems with the common ownership of personal data within a consortium. Thus, the consortium often groups the physical ownership of data collection and processing units within a joint venture. The company establishes data models and extracts more information from the data collected and licenses expertise to other consortium members. Therefore, if the data is not limited to industrial data but also contains personal data, the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) could limit the use of the data.
During the project, consortium members will develop new technologies, develop sketches and probably even have a product under a common brand. All of these activities will produce PIs, which consortium members jointly file patents, create copyrighted material or register trademarks (so-called leading IP). Nevertheless, each party to the consortium could play a different role in the development of a specific investigation period. Because of these unstructured contributions, it can be difficult to attribute newly developed intellectual property rights to either of the two parties. It is therefore imperative to develop a mechanism for awarding IP ownership already included in the consortium agreement. However, not only are IP rights developed and created over the life of the project, but both parties generally need existing IP rights for the project (so-called background IP).