How to file copyright on your new technology: protecting a fish-friendly turbine runner, its firmware and its data

This sheet is general information from an engineering practice that has been through the process, not legal advice. A patent attorney will earn their fee. What follows is meant to make that conversation shorter and the invoice smaller.

Three rights, one machine

Take a variable-pitch bulb turbine runner designed so that a salmon smolt can pass through the blade gap at the pressure gradient the fish can survive. Inside that one assembly there are at least three protectable things, and they are protected by three different laws.

• The idea of how it works, meaning the blade-gap geometry, the pitch control law that opens the gap at low head, and the pressure-recovery draft tube that keeps the decompression rate below the fish's injury threshold. That is a patent, if it is new and inventive.
• The written expression of it, meaning the firmware on the pitch controller, the CAD files, the technical drawings, the test reports and the bathymetric survey data that the design was tuned against. That is copyright, and in the UK it arises automatically the moment the work is fixed.
• The look of it, meaning the shape of the blade and hub as an article, independent of function. That is design right, registered or unregistered.

Asking how to copyright the runner is therefore asking the wrong question of two-thirds of the machine. Here is each part in turn.

Patenting the runner

A UK patent is applied for at the Intellectual Property Office, which everyone calls the UKIPO. A European patent is applied for at the European Patent Office, the EPO, and on grant becomes a bundle of national patents in the countries you validate it in. The UK is still a member of the European Patent Convention, so EPO filings continue to cover it. Both routes examine the same three tests: is the invention new, does it involve an inventive step over what a skilled person already knew, and is it capable of industrial application.

The trap for engineers is novelty. A patent is destroyed by any public disclosure before the filing date, including your own conference paper, your own website and your own tender submission to a lagoon developer. File first, or at least file a provisional-style initial application, before you show anyone the gap geometry. In the UK you can file a description without claims to secure a priority date and have twelve months to complete it. Use that year to run the tests that let the claims be specific.

Claim drafting is where the money is. A claim to any turbine with a variable blade gap would be thrown out as anticipated by sixty years of Kaplan machines. A claim to a bi-directional bulb runner where the pitch controller opens the blade gap as a defined function of the instantaneous head, so as to keep the trailing-edge pressure gradient below a stated value, is narrow enough to be new and broad enough to be worth having. The head and pressure numbers on our main sheet are the kind of quantities those claims are built from. Bring your attorney a measured curve, not a sketch.

Copyright in firmware and bathymetric datasets

Copyright in the UK is governed by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. There is no register and no filing. The right exists as soon as original work is recorded in any form, lasts for the author's life plus seventy years for literary works, and belongs to the author unless they created it in the course of employment, in which case it belongs to the employer. Software is a literary work. Your pitch controller firmware is protected from the moment you save the source file.

What copyright does not do is protect the function. A competitor who writes their own controller that opens the same blade gap at the same head has not infringed your copyright, only possibly your patent. What copyright stops is copying the code itself, the comments, the structure and the compiled binary. For this reason, keep the source under version control with dated commits, keep the build reproducible, and put a short copyright notice in every file naming the legal owner. The notice is not required for the right to exist, but it ends arguments.

Bathymetric datasets are a special case. A single sounding is a fact and facts are not protected. The dataset as a whole is protected in the UK by database right, which lasts fifteen years from completion and prevents substantial extraction, and the processed digital elevation model may also carry copyright as a compilation if there was skill and judgement in its creation. Record who paid for the survey, under what contract, and who owns the output. Most disputes we have seen were about this clause rather than about the turbine.

Design rights and the shape of the blade

A registered design at the UKIPO protects the appearance of a product for up to twenty-five years. It is cheap, fast and useful for anything a competitor might copy by eye, which for a turbine blade is more than you would think. Unregistered UK design right arises automatically for the shape and configuration of an article and lasts ten to fifteen years, but it has an exception for features that must fit or match another part, and a runner blade mostly consists of such features. Register the design if the shape is distinctive. Do not rely on the unregistered right for a hub that has to bolt to someone else's shaft.

Open-source or proprietary

Marine energy has a strong open-source culture, partly from research council funding conditions and partly from a sensible recognition that the sector is too small to afford twelve incompatible controllers. The choice is not a moral one. It is a question of where the money comes from.

• Open the model, keep the hardware. Publishing the hydrodynamic model and the controller interface under a permissive licence, while patenting the runner geometry, is the pattern we see most often. It builds a user base and keeps the one thing that is hard to copy.
• Copyleft the firmware if you sell support. A copyleft licence obliges anyone who distributes a modified controller to publish their changes. If your business is commissioning and tuning, that is an asset. If your business is selling controllers, it is a problem.
• Never open the survey data by accident. Bathymetry is expensive to collect and is often licensed to you rather than owned. Check the survey contract before any dataset goes into a public repository.

A filing sequence that works

1. Before any disclosure, file an initial UK patent application describing the runner, the control law and the measured basis. Record the filing date.
2. Add a copyright notice to every source file, drawing and report, with the legal entity as owner. Confirm employment and contractor agreements assign IP to that entity.
3. Within twelve months, complete the patent application with drafted claims, and decide whether to extend via the EPO or an international application.
4. Register the blade design if the shape is distinctive on its own.
5. Choose the licence for any published code deliberately, and write it into the repository before the first external commit.
6. Keep a dated log of who saw what and when. It is the first document an attorney will ask for in any dispute.

The engineering that earns this protection is on our main sheet. The feasibility desk shows what a few points of head utilisation are worth in annual GWh, and that figure is the cleanest answer to the question of whether the patent fees are justified.