EV Charger Technology Licensing

Three categories of IP

1. 1

   Background IP

   Owned before the programme. Platform architecture, existing firmware modules, accumulated methods. Normally licensed rather than assigned, because it underpins other customers' products too.

2. 2

   Project IP

   Created specifically for your programme. Ownership is genuinely negotiable and should be decided before work starts.

3. 3

   Manufacturing know-how

   How the product is built, tested and held in tolerance. Rarely written down fully, and the most commercially valuable of the three.

Firmware layers

Firmware is not one asset. Rights are usually granted differently across layers.

• Bootloader, which carries secure update and recovery behaviour
• Application layer, where product behaviour lives
• Protocol stack, including OCPP implementation
• Hardware abstraction, tied closely to the board design
• Third party libraries, whose licences constrain what can be passed on

Third party components deserve early attention. Their licences may prevent the transfer terms you were planning to agree.

Manufacturing package versus design source

The right to build is not the right to change. A manufacturing package lets a factory produce the product as designed. Design source rights let an engineering team alter it. Many programmes need the first and ask for the second.

Tooling ownership

Who paid for the tooling, who owns it, where it physically sits and who maintains it. If tooling was amortised into unit price rather than paid for directly, ownership is rarely as obvious as either party assumes.

Cloud, data and credentials

• Backend or CMS source rights, which are separate from firmware rights
• Deployment account ownership and administrative control
• Data ownership, including session and telemetry data
• Credential custody and rotation responsibility
• Export rights, so you can leave with your data intact

Signing keys and security custody

Firmware signing keys, certificate authorities and provisioning secrets need a defined custodian, a defined rotation process and a defined answer to what happens if they are compromised.

This is the part of a licensing agreement most often left undrafted, and the one with the worst consequences when it matters.

Post-transfer engineering

Licensing determines rights. It does not by itself provide ongoing engineering. Change control, firmware releases, security updates and field analysis are a separate commercial arrangement, and most programmes need one.

How we work with you on this

A licence is a commercial instrument, and it is worth being clear that we treat it as the start of a relationship rather than the end of a sale. The terms matter, but what decides whether a licence is worth anything is whether the licensee can actually build and support the product afterwards.

So licensing comes with the engineering behind it: training, test systems, and continuing support on a monthly model. A licence handed over without those is a document, not a capability.

What managed licensing means

Most technology licensing is a transfer followed by silence. You receive a package, and everything that happens to the product afterwards is yours to deal with.

Ours continues. Protocol versions move, standards are revised, security expectations change. When the product needs to move with them, that upgrade comes through the licence rather than as a new project. An OCPP revision is the obvious case: when a new version is released, licensees get it.

The practical consequence is that you do not need to build and hold a large engineering team to keep a licensed product current. That is the point of the arrangement.

What you get

• Manufacturing know-how and the manufacturing IP, so you can build the product
• The right to manufacture in your market
• Continuing upgrades as part of the licence, including protocol revisions
• CMS licensing alongside the hardware or on its own, also managed
• Your data stays yours

Background IP remains with RIOD. That is normal for a licence and it does not limit what you can build or sell under it.

Where this differs from white label

A lot of the market offers white label, where you get the product and the supplier keeps the data and the control.

• Under a licence you manufacture, rather than reselling somebody else's units
• The data from your deployments is yours, not your supplier's
• Custom features can be developed against your requirement, on both hardware and software
• Upgrades are contractual rather than discretionary

That difference is the whole reason to licence rather than to distribute.