Imagine the following scenario: You, as the founder of a business, have spent the past three years building your company. You have been bootstrapping until now, but the company is at a crossroads and in order to grow the company to its full potential, you have decided to turn to venture capital to attract additional funding. Because yours is a younger company, and therefore a riskier investment, your potential investors have decided to conduct thorough due diligence to allay some of their concerns. You suddenly think about the third parties whose intellectual property your company uses in its regular operation – you paid for access to that intellectual property so you are free to use it however and whenever you want, right?