"Ethics" means the morality or the treatment of moral questions, or honourable actions, in any situation. Professional ethics should always govern the actions of the engineer. The field of engineering is one where new developments are often occurring. This brings us to the question of intellectual property. Who owns the idea or development? 

To protect these new ideas the engineer or his/her company can patent them. Patenting involves registering a design so that it is legally recognised as being owned by somebody. If a design is patented, it is not ethical for another company or individual to copy that design. Designs may be used, however, by others under licence (that is by agreement), or a company may allow other companies to freely use the design in their own products without a licence. Volvo, for example, developed the three point car seatbelt that we all use today. After developing it they patented the design and then allowed all companies to use it. They considered that people's safety was more important than commercial advantage. Had they not allowed others to use it, other companies would have needed to design another type of restraint that did not infringe the Volvo patent. 

Patents need not be granted only on a finished product. They may be granted on an idea or a series of annotated sketches and descriptions. Nonetheless, it protects the engineer's ideas from unscrupulous people who may use their ideas for their own gain. 

While patents are there to protect a new development, some people have claimed that patents hamper development. I. K. Brunel claimed that patents had the potential to slow 19th Century engineering, as new developments could not be utilised by others. The early Watt steam engines, for example, could not use the crank mechanism to convert linear motion into rotary motion because someone else held a patent over this mechanism. Patents can be renewed but they do eventually expire. Once this occurs, anyone is free to use that design, without compensation to the original patentee. 

While most people comply with registered patents, some use unethical methods to obtain and copy registered designs. This is often called industrial espionage, Companies may use industrial espionage to gain ideas or knowledge of developments, which make it easy for them to design something of their own that is similar.