Case Study: Mechanical CV Joints I. Narrative You graduated as a mechanical engi

Case Study: Mechanical CV Joints
I. Narrative
You graduated as a mechanical engineer five years ago, taking a job as a trainee engineer with a major
automotive manufacturer. Since you were not happy with this company, you left three years ago to work for
Hallmark, a large UK based engineering consultancy company with several important offices worldwide.
Hallmark commonly contract-out their employees to other companies (many consultancies do this). These
often involve Hallmark engineers working for many months (sometimes years) at the other company,
forming close working relationships with the company’s engineers and other staff, and being party to
information and data that are confidential to the company.
Soon after you started at Hallmark, they contracted you to work for PartCo Ltd, a large company that designs
and manufactures automotive parts (PartCo often contract with Hallmark for engineers when PartCo has
important work that requires extra staff). PartCo is a worldwide organisation and does business with most
UK, European and Japanese automobile manufacturers. You joined a group doing relatively routine, but
highly demanding, work on clarifying the design details for a new range of constant velocity (CV) joints for
front-wheel drives. This required computer-based engineering simulations of the parts, testing of
prototypes, and final assurance of the products before the designs were released for manufacturing.
Whilst you have been doing this, you got a really good idea for a completely new type of CV joint. You have
worked on the idea at week-ends and now believe that it could revolutionise vehicle propulsion. You have
continued to work privately on this idea after returning to Hallmark to work on other, non-automotive, jobs.
You have told no-one at either PartCo or Hallmark of your private activities on the new CV joints.
II. Questions on Ethics and Professionalism
Consider the following scenario:
(i) What intellectual property (IP) is involved here?
(ii) Who owns it?
(iii) If you wished to secure and exploit rights to the new CV joint, how would you go about it?
(iv) Could you justify your actions ethically?
Required Submission:
submit a powerpoint presentation of no more than 4 slides, including the title slide, that answer the questions and any additional information they wish to include.
use IEE Citation, sources are not necessarily 4, use as much as needed.