As was mentioned, industries want to have access to IP. So when we license them, it's quite important that we can guarantee those companies that we are the owner of the IP so that in future litigation we're not going to be at play. One has to realize that when we conclude a licence agreement with a company, it's not that they won that matters a lot. But if that the company is making a lot of money out of that technology, competitors may be looking at where this technology has come from--who the real owner is. So it's very important that we are in a position to demonstrate to companies that have licences from us that we are the true owner, and that we did due diligence to make sure there is no possible way the licensee will be sued by their competitors on the basis that the IP does not belong to us. So these are complex negotiations, and access is one aspect.
Sometimes a company will want to have exclusive access to our technologies. That can be a matter of debate, because some of the IP we own can have applications in many industry sectors. I'll give you an example of a technology we could license to the aerospace sector. They could ask for exclusive rights to that technology, but if we know that this piece of technology could also have application in the automotive sector, we will refuse to give them exclusive rights on the whole of the technology. We may claim that we'll give them exclusive rights for aerospace, but we will retain the right to license this technology to the automotive sector, which obviously is not the same line of business. Therefore we're not penalized by adding restricted access to the technology. We keep the right to offer the technology to other industry sectors if we believe it has applications in other sectors.
These are the challenges we face with the industry.