Company: AIP
Filing Date: 2025-02-18
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001667011-25-000010
Chunk: 59

Company: Arteris, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-18
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 59
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 could counterclaim that our intellectual property is invalid or unenforceable and the court may agree, in which case we could lose valuable intellectual property rights. Any litigation of this nature, regardless of outcome or merit, could materially harm our business and hurt our competitive advantage.

If we are unable to protect our proprietary technology and inventions through trade secrets, our competitive position and financial results could be adversely affected.

As noted above, we seek to protect our proprietary technology and innovations, particularly those relating to our products, as patents, trade secrets and other forms of intellectual property. Additionally, while software and other forms of our proprietary works may be protected under copyright law, in some cases we have chosen not to register any copyrights in these works, and instead, primarily rely on protecting our software as a trade secret. In the United States, trade secrets are protected under the federal Economic Espionage Act of 1996 and the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (the Defend Trade Secrets Act), and under state law, with many states having adopted the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (the UTSA) and several of which that have not. In addition to these federal and state laws inside the United States, under the World Trade Organization’s Trade Related-Aspects of IP Rights Agreement (the TRIPS Agreement), trade secrets are to be protected by World Trade Organization member states as “confidential information.” Under the UTSA and other trade secret laws, protection of our proprietary information as trade secrets requires us to take steps to prevent unauthorized disclosure to third parties or misappropriation by third parties. In addition, the full benefit of the remedies available under the Defend Trade Secrets Act requires specific language and notice requirements present in the relevant agreements, which may not be present in all of our agreements. While we require our officers, employees, consultants, distributors, and existing and prospective customers and collaborators to sign confidentiality agreements and take various security measures to protect unauthorized disclosure and misappropriation of our trade secrets, we cannot assure or predict that these measures will be sufficient. The semiconductor industry is generally subject to a high turnover of employees, so the risk of trade secret misappropriation may be amplified. If any of our trade secrets are subject to unauthorized disclosure or are otherwise misappropriated by third parties, our competitive position may be materially and adversely affected.

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Our ability to compete successfully depends in part on our ability to commercialize our IP solutions without infringing the patent, trade secret or other intellectual property rights of others.

To the same extent that we seek to