Chapter 4 - Intellectual Property
The intellectual property chapter does apply to M3GAN, but it functions as background mechanics rather than directly appearing as a central theme to the movie. Some of the intellectual property has to be inferred and is just shown, but not explicitly stated.
Funki treats the core of M3GAN as confidential know-how: model weights, training data, safety rules, and scripts. On screen, this looks like a tightly fenced project; only Gemma, Tess, and Cole touch the prototype. Even their boss, David, despite knowing about the cost of the project, allowed and allocated them to be the only three people to work on it.
The first time anyone got to see the project was when they were giving a demonstration to the investors of the company, and they showed how M3GAN works. After the demo, Gemma and David are talking to one of the higher-ups in the company, and she is told that they need to go in front of a lawyer so that she can be kept under the company. They also want to schedule an announcement in order to show the product and start the patent process so that no one else can copy their ideas.
The assistant, Kurt, is shown copying internal M3GAN project files to his own media with the intent to move them outside of company channels. That is the straight, movie-visible case of a trade secret leak. He doesn’t “share” ownership by copying; instead, he creates an unlawful risk that Funki’s private trade secrets will reach a rival. The project is currently not protected by a patent, so it acts as a trade secret, and Kurt was going to sell the secret to benefit himself. This is before the patent is created, so there is nothing that the company has to protect the design from getting stolen or copied.
Gemma is also seen connecting M3GAN to a workstation to check M3GAN’s rewritten code or run diagnostics. While there is no mention of whether the parent would be able to modify M3GAN to fit their needs, it is implied that M3GAN, as an autonomous robot, would be able to learn and adapt based on the needs placed upon it. In addition, the fact that Gemma has to constantly bring it to the lab implies that checkups or updates are only done inside the lab, which means that this is similar to DRM-style gating, where the consumer only gets the finished product, without being able to modify it. The only changes in the code that can be made are by the Android when learning for itself on how to behave and adapt.
“M3GAN” is treated as a product name/brand in internal decks and launch prep. The investor demo functions as a brand launch moment, where they position a named, stylized consumer robot the company will later market and, in the real world, police against knock-offs that misuse the name or logo.
M3GAN is created on company time with company resources (Funki’s lab, budgets, test rigs, data collection), so the resulting IP sits with Funki under ordinary employment/assignment terms. There was also mention that the company will sue Gemma and the team for working on M3GAN due to it being a waste of company funds without working on the main assignment, after David explicitly said that they need to discard the project altogether. However, Gemma decides to continue working on the product, and when David sees the improved design, he gets excited and says that he will present it to the higher-ups. Even though she was told to stop the project and use her old experience from creating the “Bruce” project to solve problems, the new work on M3GAN is shown happening under Funki’s umbrella. This makes it possible to be protected by an NDA, depending on how the company allows the use of anything that employees build.
No one files or argues a patent on screen, and the story doesn’t hinge on claim scope. Still, there is a brief mention of needing to stay ahead of the competition, to be the first on the market. There is also talk about getting in contact with lawyers, but it is not explicitly shown what the conversation with the lawyers is; it can only be inferred if they are filing for a patent or not. Following that, there was also the emphasis on the copycat to Furzepet, where they tweaked their design just enough to be novel, as well as being significantly cheaper, showing innovation can sidestep patents.
M3GAN isn’t an intellectual property movie, but it drops hints where these topics are implied or directly stated. While the movie doesn’t center on patents or IP, those ideas sit in the background to help drive the narrative. In short, the film gives concrete screen examples for most of the chapter’s tools, even though the drama itself is about safety and control rather than legal doctrines.