IP Protection & Clearance Review — by an AI council
Decide what IP to protect and what you might be infringing. Four rival AIs debate it and hand back: A view on what to protect, what risks infringement, and next steps.
A view on what to protect, what risks infringement, and next steps.
Signed off by an independent Final QA audit — with a “verify before you rely on this” list, never a black box.
Why this team
IP conversations swing between paranoia and negligence, so the seats hold both ends: the IP Attorney maps what is actually protectable — trademark, copyright, patent, trade secret are different tools for different assets — while the Corporate Lawyer checks the licences and contracts behind everything you “borrowed”. The Brand Strategist weighs which assets carry real commercial value versus legal-sounding comfort, the Risk Officer ranks infringement exposure by who would actually enforce against you, and the Pragmatist keeps the budget honest: protection you will not enforce is an expensive certificate.
Each seat runs on a different frontier model — GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok — so it’s a genuine cross-model review, not one AI in costumes. How a run works →
What the debate sounds like
An illustrative excerpt — A design studio launching a furniture brand has a name it never cleared, product designs inspired by a famous mid-century line, marketing fonts on personal-use licences, and a manufacturing process it considers its secret sauce.
Four assets, four different instruments — and the current plan protects none of them. The name needs a clearance search before another unit ships; using it uncleared is building equity in something you may be forced to abandon. The process is trade-secret territory: no filing, but it is only a secret if contracts and access controls make it one. The designs and fonts are not protection questions at all — they are infringement questions, which is the other half of this review.
Ranking the exposure realistically: the fonts are the certain, cheap problem — personal-use licences in commercial marketing is exactly what foundries’ automated enforcement finds, and it is a solved problem for a small licence fee. The design-inspiration question is the expensive one: heritage furniture estates enforce actively. “Inspired by” has a legal edge, and I want the specific pieces reviewed against the originals before the catalogue ships.
Commercial weight check: the name is the asset everything else compounds into — clearance is not a legal chore, it is protecting the marketing spend from day one. But do not over-file: a design studio does not need trademarks in forty classes. Name and logo in the classes you trade in, and the budget saved goes to fixing the actual infringement exposure.
Questions
Can the council do a trademark clearance search?
No — clearance searches and filings need qualified IP counsel with access to the registries, and the deliverable says so explicitly. What it does is triage: which of your assets deserve the counsel budget, in what order, and which questions to bring — so the professional engagement starts at the decision, not the inventory.
We borrowed ideas, code and fonts everywhere — how exposed are we really?
That is the review’s second half: an honest sweep of what you borrowed — names, designs, fonts, code, content — ranked by who would realistically enforce and what it would cost. The usual finding is a short list where one item is urgent, several are cheap fixes, and much of the fear was misplaced.
What actually protects a “secret sauce” process?
Behaviour, not paperwork: trade-secret protection exists only while you actively keep the secret — NDAs with everyone exposed to it, access limits, marked documents. No registration, no filing. The review checks whether your practices would currently qualify, because “everyone here just knows it” does not.
Your material is used only to run your review — never to train public models. Encrypted in transit and at rest. Security & privacy →
Want full control — pick your own minds, set the depth? Open the full council →