Intellectual property rights that apply to our various products and services include patents, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, and maskwork rights. We maintain a program to protect our investment in technology by attempting to ensure respect for our intellectual property rights. The extent of the legal protection given to different types of intellectual property rights varies under different countries' legal systems. We intend to license our intellectual property rights where we can obtain adequate consideration. See "Competition" in Part I, Item 1 of this Form 10-K; "Legal Proceedings" in Part I, Item 3 of this Form 10-K; and "Risk Factors" in Part I, Item 1A of this Form 10-K.

We have filed and obtained a number of patents in the U.S. and other countries. While our patents are an important element of our success, our business as a whole is not significantly dependent on any one patent. We and other companies in the computing, telecommunications, and related high-technology fields typically apply for and receive, in the aggregate, tens of thousands of overlapping patents annually in the U.S. and other countries.

We believe that the duration of the applicable patents that we are granted is adequate relative to the expected lives of our products. Because of the fast pace of innovation and product development, our products are often obsolete before the patents related to them expire, and sometimes are obsolete before the patents related to them are even granted. As we expand our product offerings into new industries, we also seek to extend our patent development efforts to patent such product offerings. Established competitors in existing and new industries, as well as companies that purchase and enforce patents and other intellectual property, may already have patents covering similar products. There is no assurance that we will be able to obtain patents covering our own products, or that we will be able to obtain licenses from such companies on favorable terms or at all.

The majority of the software that we distribute, including software embedded in our component- and system-level products, is entitled to copyright protection.

To distinguish Intel products from our competitors' products, we have obtained certain trademarks and trade names for our products, and we maintain cooperative advertising programs with certain customers to promote our brands and to identify products containing genuine Intel components.

We also protect certain details about our processes, products, and strategies as trade secrets, keeping confidential the information that we believe provides us with a competitive advantage. We have ongoing programs designed to maintain the confidentiality of such information.