“In 2000-2004 at Harvard, there were no start-ups or incubators on campus and venture capitalists weren’t investing in students. Everyone pursued stable careers in law, medicine or finance”, says Divya Narendra. The name of this young quadra is familiar to you? Is it normal, this entrepreneur found himself at the heart of a conflict which shook Silicon Valley: the one who pitted him and the Winklevoss twins against Mark Zuckerberg.The trio of Harvard students approached their classmate “Zuck” in 2003 to develop their social network project “Without taking any basic precaution such as a confidentiality agreement”, sighs a specialist in intellectual property law.A levity that they have not finished regretting: Mark Zuckerberg will finally develop Facebook without them, becoming CEO of a colossus which achieved 100 billion dollars in turnover in 2022.
A case that has marked the minds of all tech entrepreneurs, now well aware of the issues. Because the threat has not weakened, quite the contrary. Impersonators are always on the prowl. Some groups like Rocket Internet have built their entire fortune by copying popular concepts (their platform Zalando was the facsimile of Zappos). Meta, meanwhile, has continued to draw inspiration from good ideas from the competition, importing Snapchat Stories to Instagram or more recently TikTok-style short videos (renamed Reels on its networks).
Industrial espionage, for its part, has taken on a whole new dimension in the digital sphere. Last May, Numerama tipA cybereason report revealed that Chinese hackers had been conducting an industrial espionage campaign for three years targeting dozens of companies in the technology and chemical sectors in Europe, Asia and North America. One of the finest European flagships, the Dutch ASML, which manufactures machines for burning the most sophisticated chips, more recently claimed to have had information stolen by an employee based in China.
The living rooms, nests of spies
So how do you protect yourself? First, by no longer going to present its products at la fleur au fusil shows. “We never leave our computers unattended during this type of event, explains David Chquiry CEO of Green Tech Innovations, who presented at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES), last January, a smart light equipped with high-efficiency photovoltaic cells. . Like him, the tricolor entrepreneurs present at the event had been carefully briefed by state agencies. “Ahead of the show, we carried out intellectual property audits of the French start-ups that went there,” said Eric Morand, director of the B2B events department of the national agency Business France.
There, there’s no question of being distracted by the slot machines and flashy neon lights of Las Vegas: pitches to potential customers had been meticulously prepared so as not to reveal too much information in the heat of the moment. “For the duration of the event, use of the hotel’s WiFi is prohibited to prevent malicious intrusions. Even the devices that we take only store data and files that we want to communicate to the public. There is no confidential information on it,” says David Chquiry. Paranoid? Not at all. Malicious people sometimes come there with professional spy equipment”, confided to us an event specialist on the spot.
At a time when digital infuses daily life, the threat does not weaken within our borders. “When it comes to mundane tasks, we use standard equipment and means of protection. But when we work on sensitive subjects, we do it in dedicated places, on computers disconnected from the internet”, confides the boss of a French technological jewel which works with the State. The legal aspect should not be neglected either. “Often, entrepreneurial duos made up of a creator and a more business profile do not think of making a shareholders’ agreement and dividing up the intellectual property rights as long as there is no disagreement. But the day that happens, everything gets complicated”, warns a lawyer specializing in intellectual property law.
Patents, a double-edged sword
Even if not everything can be protected, there is a wide arsenal of tools to protect what we invent. Patents are of course the centerpiece. In the EU, the European Patent Office (EPO) registered 188,600 applications in 2021 (+4.5%), a total driven by innovations in digital communication (15,400), medical technologies (15,321 ) and IT (14,671). Patents, however, are a double-edged sword. “A patent costs 5,000 euros per year and per country, so the cost is not negligible for a young company. And if you patent too early, on a reduced list of countries, it reveals certain manufacturing secrets to competitors who may have the ability to consolidate their offer faster than you,” says David Chquiry, whose company has filed several patents.
After years of negotiations, the European Union has finally succeeded in agreeing on the principle of the unitary patent which will protect an invention in 17 countries of the zone, simultaneously, for an amount equivalent to less than 4 national patents. It remains to be seen whether this will give a second wind to France, which currently patents fewer innovations in Europe than its German neighbor. In 2021, France was at the origin of only 6% of the patents filed at the EPO compared to 9% for China, 11% for Japan, 14% for Germany and 25% for the United States. .
When a project does not fall within the sphere of what is patentable, other mechanisms in France make it possible to protect entrepreneurs. For example, Soleau envelopes or probationary deposits that allow an idea or the start of a project to be dated in secret and at no significant cost. “When two companies achieve the same result, one can claim that the other has copied it. These elements help to protect themselves in this type of litigation”, explains Paul Perpere, Ile-de-France regional delegate at the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI).
Designs can, for their part, benefit from the protection linked to drawings and models. “Finally, it is crucial to register your trademark in all the countries that you target”, underlines Paul Perpere. These safety nets even constitute a selling point to succeed in a round of financing “When we study a file, we ensure that everything is in order in terms of intellectual property, we must ensure that the innovations are well protected but also that the start-up does not infringe the rights of other companies”, confirms a venture capitalist.
“No need to trust each other anymore”
Sovereignty obliges, France monitors like a mother hen the customers or investors who approach the tricolor nuggets working in sensitive areas. “France’s line is non-naive diplomacy,” Didier Boulogne and Eric Morand of the Business France agency told us last January. For certain types of start-ups, in particular those developing technologies related to luxury or to the art of living, a country like China is a very relevant area. But if it comes to very sensitive technologies, such as quantum, we don’t go there”
Good news, technology makes it possible to create new safes in which to house each other’s manufacturing secrets. By working closely with the cryptography laboratory of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the French start-up Cosmian has thus developed tools offering an unprecedented level of confidentiality. Their starting point? New clients or new collaborations often involve revealing certain internal data that we would prefer to keep for ourselves. “For example, start-ups specializing in health need to run their algorithms on hospital data, but the latter cannot transfer this data ‘in the clear’ (Editor’s note without having been encrypted)”, explains Sandrine Murcia CEO and co-founder of Cosmian. And it would be just as risky for these start-ups to entrust their “top secret” algorithms to their clients.
The solution developed by Cosmian makes it possible to keep all these collaborations behind the screen of encryption. “It is already possible to encrypt data before sending it so that no one can read it without the correct key. But that takes time and you often have to go over the data in plain text to work on it, perform a calculation,” explains Sandrine Murcia. With the ENS laboratory, Cosmian has developed tools that allow the encryption shield to be used without slowing down and from one work step to another, without interruption. “In the health sector, illustrates the CEO of Cosmian, at no time will the start-up be able to read data relating to a patient from a hospital with which it works, but that will not prevent it from analyze the database transmitted and draw all the useful conclusions.” All with the certainty that at no time can his partner take a look at the workings of his service.
A potential that interests many sectors, for example fintechs and banks that want to collaborate, but also need high levels of confidentiality. Especially since this should provide a solution to the headache that arises for companies when they switch to the cloud. Of course, the “cloud” can save them a lot of time. The problem is that the giants of the sector are all American and that the cloud Act US gives American justice considerable leeway to take a look in the files that are stored. understandably displeases many European companies. need to trust you”, argues Sandrine Murcia.In English, experts in the sector refer to this as the sweet name of “Zero Trust”. Not very warm, it’s true. But probably safer than gauging someone’s reliability by the firmness of their handshake.