by Mark Rosman and Cameron Tepfer
From left to right: Mark Rosman and Cameron Tepfer. Photos courtesy of Proskauer Rose LLP.
Just as too much ice cream can lead to a stomachache, or too much wine can lead to a headache – even hyper-focus on compliance can lead to too much of a good thing. Part of the complication is figuring out where to draw the boundary, when is it enough?
In the last decade, DOJ’s Antitrust Division has been following in the footsteps of the Department’s Criminal Division in developing public guidance for companies and executives for navigating internal compliance procedures. This culminated in November 2024 with DOJ’s Antitrust Division publishing its newly minted, “Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs in Criminal Antitrust Investigations,” (the “Guidance”)[1] consisting of inordinately detailed and intrusive business guidelines instructing companies on how the Division believes businesses should go about preventing and detecting misconduct. The Guidance expands on DOJ’s longstanding guidance related to corporate compliance in the same way that the Louisiana Purchase expanded the United States. While the prior guidance was limited to just three questions, the new Guidance dwarfs that at more than 200 questions that prosecutors are supposed to ask themselves — and by extension defense counsel and executives — when judging a company’s compliance program. By contrast, the New York Times only recommends that one asks a potential spouse thirteen questions before getting married,[2] a standard round of Jeopardy is only thirty questions, and even Major League Baseball’s interminable regular season ends after 162 games.
The new Guidance undoubtedly includes some helpful questions, though these largely mirror long-standing compliance guidance. For example, the Guidance instructs prosecutors to focus on how well the compliance program functions generally (i.e. “[d]oes the compliance program address and prohibit criminal antitrust violations?”) as well as how it performed with respect to the antitrust violation at issue (i.e. “[d]id the compliance program detect and facilitate prompt reporting of the violation?”)[3] It also asks prosecutors to focus on a longstanding priority of DOJ: the extent that a company’s senior management was involved in a violation.[4] These questions are sensible, measurable, and provide companies with at least some measure of compliance direction.
Additionally, the Guidance admirably attempts to modernize prosecutors’ and by extension companies’ approach to compliance, asking them to consider novel and thorny issues involving the use of artificial intelligence and retaining ephemeral messaging.[5] This is consistent with recent DOJ statements highlighting its continued focus on developing expertise in determining whether evolving technology is being used to facilitate collusion.[6] But like the Cheesecake Factory’s sprawling menu,[7] when you reach entrée number fifty you are bound to encounter some duds.
For example, should prosecutors really delve into the exact format of compliance reports made to senior leadership?[8] Do prosecutors need to tackle whether a company experiences “cultural, linguistic, or other barriers to implementing the company’s antitrust compliance polices,” with respect to its foreign subsidiaries?[9] And should it matter who “is the lowest level employee who must receive antitrust compliance training?”[10] After reading this guidance, one might be struck with yet another question: Is all this necessary?
Putting aside the considerable length and redundancy of the Guidance, it also poses a challenge to the competence of any prosecutor. Federal antitrust prosecutors tend to be highly trained lawyers with significant experience in investigating and prosecuting antitrust violations. They are supervised by those similarly situated. They are not business leaders. By training and experience, they have not had to make the difficult decisions business leaders are forced to make when weighing the benefits of a compliance program to its costs. But the Guidance places prosecutors in exactly this position. Making matters worse, the Guidance provides no advice for prosecutors as to how these 200 questions should be weighed against each other. Do some of these factors count more than others? How should conflicting factors be integrated? The Guidance provides no instruction.
The November 2024 compliance publication is the embodiment of previous administrations’ excessive focus on compliance. To be fair, this focus comes from an understandable position. Corporate prosecutions are tough. It can take years to sift through emails and messages, interview and develop cooperating witnesses, and ultimately charge corporate defendants. The defense bar is a fierce one and DOJ turnover, among other factors, can slow investigations. In that context, it makes sense why DOJ would prefer to have prosecutors and companies focus on compliance programs which—theoretically at least—should reduce the time and resources necessary to prosecute corporate collusion. But taken to its extreme, this focus—embodied in this 200-question corporate survey—does not necessarily further DOJ’s goals. It certainly does not make life any easier for most business leaders who are conscientiously trying to manage compliance concerns with limited resources. This is particularly the case for foreign companies who can find themselves in DOJ’s crosshairs. These companies may be far less accustomed to DOJ’s existing corporate enforcement practices and be particularly burdened if not bewildered by the thorny thickets of this compliance guidance.
Instead of proliferating even more detailed guidance about how business leaders should run their businesses, DOJ should stick to what it does best: investigating and enforcing the current antitrust laws on the books.
How it all started was, a decade ago, with good intentions, the DOJ sought to recognize compliance efforts and incentivize companies to devote more legal spend to ward off the axis of antitrust evil — price fixing, bid rigging and market allocation. This mission was exemplified in the 2015 U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio settlement in U.S. v Kayaba Industry Co., when the DOJ applied compliance credit against a criminal fine in response to efforts to improve a forward-looking compliance program.[11] By doing so, the DOJ hoped that, in addition to its policy of offering leniency to the first company to self-report antitrust wrongdoing, crediting compliance efforts would further incentivize companies to boost antitrust compliance resources — which could in turn lead to more self-reporting resulting from the enhanced detection of potential problems.
Since then, the gospel of antitrust compliance has spread like creeping kudzu into a cottage industry of compliance experts, academics and, most dreaded of all, monitors who seek to make a living out of whipping businesses into shape. Businesses have been forced to make hard choices about devoting limited resources to antitrust compliance, perhaps at the expense of other equally important competing compliance needs, such as human trafficking, anti-corruption, money laundering, sanctions, or data privacy and protection.
In the B.C.E., or Before Compliance Era, the DOJ managed to do its job of ensuring businesses played by the rules without the need to ask businesses to answer hundreds of smothering questions. It did this by laser-focusing its efforts on finding out whether a crime occurred and whether it had the required proof to bring a case. Now, the DOJ is pressing businesses on inquires such as: “How is attendance at training recorded and preserved?” and “Have the board of directors and/or external auditors held executive or private sessions with the compliance and control functions?”[12] Are these really the kind of questions that federal prosecutors should be spending valuable time on and requesting that businesses use precious resources to answer? Are prosecutors even qualified to meaningfully answer these questions and weigh the answers? Is any benefit of such excessive questioning outweighed by the harm it produces?
For example, there’s scant research to show antitrust compliance programs even work or at least justify the huge amount of time and money DOJ expects companies to devote to the effort. According to Drata’s compliance trends report for 2025, 74% of organizations report that compliance overall is a burden, and they are not able to properly address vulnerabilities due to limited budgets and resources.[13] In addition, according to that same Drata report, 76% of companies that use point-in-time compliance argue the related effort poses a burden.[14] And according to NorthRow’s State of Compliance Trends 2023 report, on average, 25% of business revenue is spent on compliance costs.[15] That is an astronomical amount, a quarter of all revenue, to be spent on compliance.
As with any significant spending decision, companies must reasonably ask themselves: what’s the return on investment?
One way for companies to answer that question is to look at whether DOJ has actually provided benefits to companies for robust compliance programs. But in the last ten years, since Kayaba, there have been few, if any, examples of DOJ at least publicly crediting a company’s compliance program in connection with a corporate resolution. In other words, there is little evidence that DOJ is offering any “carrot” or benefit at all in connection with a functioning compliance program.
Companies also could look to see if DOJ is actually wielding a stick. In other words, if DOJ was applying sanctions in the form of fines and jail time — e.g., the massive convictions and fines the DOJ obtained in investigations of the air transportation ($1.8 Billion), automotive parts ($2.9 Billion), and Korean oil refinery ($365 Million) sectors from 2007 through 2019 — companies would naturally sit up, take note, and shift scarce legal resources to preventing or detecting antitrust violations. Those convictions and fines were levied against multi-national companies that were involved in long-running antitrust conspiracies that affected tens of millions of consumers and the U.S. government. And they provided a clear message to companies.
But in recent times, there have been no major investigations resulting in convictions and fines like the ones mentioned above, nor incentives offered, giving companies little reason to act. And the DOJ’s newly invigorated whistleblower program could only muddy the waters. In January 2026, DOJ announced its first-ever whistleblower reward, a $1 million reward to an individual whistleblower, while the targeted company EBLOCK paid a $3.28 million fine.[16] Penalties of these sizes seem unlikely to motivate companies to invest millions in enhanced compliance. Moreover, a focus on incentivizing whistleblowers potentially could reduce the value of leniency.
The whistleblower program promises a potential whistleblower fifteen to thirty percent of any fine ultimately collected. But even the best designed corporate compliance programs do not offer those sorts of incentives. Imagine an altruistic company employee comes across an email or overhears a conversation suggesting collusive behavior with a competitor. That employee could choose to report that information internally to a supervisor or compliance officer. But where’s the reward in that? Instead, if that employee runs to DOJ, that employee could be entitled to millions in compensation. A corporate compliance program only functions if company employees are incentivized to report misconduct internally, but DOJ’s whistleblower program incentivizes company employees to report externally. These incentives are compounded by the lack of a corporate leniency safety valve in the whistleblower program: there is no grace period for companies to self-report following a whistleblower report. Notably, while the Antitrust Division program does not allow for such a grace period, its cousin, DOJ’s Criminal Division corporate whistleblower program does. That program still provides leniency eligibility for companies that voluntarily self-report within 120 days of a whistleblower report.[17] The Antitrust Division should follow this example.
In sum, DOJ is promoting a whistleblower program that actively undermines the efficacy of corporate compliance programs and also provides fewer incentives for companies to self-report. Under these circumstances, what incentives does a company have to invest significant resources in corporate compliance?
In the absence of the carrot of compliance and the stick of convictions, compounded by the uncertain implications of a new whistleblower program, the compliance landscape remains murky. Instead, the burden has been placed on businesses to spend precious time and resources wading through a swamp of questions, hoping they don’t sink in the process. At this unfortunate point, the tail appears to be wagging the dog.
This situation begs one more question: What is the real intent of such an inordinately long list of questions, that cause extra work for businesses and may not benefit the DOJ or consumers in any material way? One could reasonably harbor the concern that this has become less an exercise in guidance and deterrence and more of a patronizing game of “gotcha” guidance, giving prosecutors a hook on which they can hang their hat to say, “Sorry, but we can’t give you credit for your compliance program because your program failed to consider the following questions….” After all, in more than 200-question test seeking open-ended answers—most of which have no objectively correct answer—the possibilities for error are abundant. And the likelihood of inconsistent applications of this compliance Rorschach are almost guaranteed.
Companies should be trusted to ask and answer questions about their businesses without undue interference and second guessing from the government. Less onerous questions and more examples of compliance success stories would be helpful, too.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1376686/dl
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/23/fashion/weddings/marriage-questions.html
[3] Guidance at 4.
[4] Id.
[5] Guidance at 6, 9-10.
[6] https://shorturl.at/1y9Pa
[7] https://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu
[8] Guidance at 5.
[9] Guidance at 11.
[10] Id.
[11] See Mem. & Mot. for Downward Departure at 11, United States v. Kayaba Indus. Co., Ltd., No. 15-CR-00098 (S.D. Ohio Oct. 5, 2015). See also https://www.law360.com/articles/714185/lightning-strikes-twice-doj-gives-2nd-compliance-credit.
[12] Guidance at 7, 11.
[13] DRATA is an AI-native trust management and compliance automation platform that assists companies in monitoring compliance and, among other things, collects and compiles compliance data (https://drata.com/blog/compliance-statistics).
[14] Id.
[15] https://25597772.fs1.hubspotusercontent-eu1.net/hubfs/25597772/eBooks/Compliance%20trends%20report%202023.pdf
[16] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/antitrust-division-and-us-postal-service-award-first-ever-1m-payment-whistleblower-reporting
[17] https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-division-corporate-whistleblower-awards-pilot-program
Mark Rosman is a Partner and Cameron Tepfer is an Associate at Proskauer Rose LLP.
The views, opinions and positions expressed within all posts are those of the author(s) alone and do not represent those of the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement (PCCE) or of the New York University School of Law. PCCE makes no representations as to the accuracy, completeness and validity or any statements made on this site and will not be liable any errors, omissions or representations. The copyright of this content belongs to the author(s) and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with the author(s).
by Mark Rosman and Cameron Tepfer
From left to right: Mark Rosman and Cameron Tepfer. Photos courtesy of Proskauer Rose LLP.
Just as too much ice cream can lead to a stomachache, or too much wine can lead to a headache – even hyper-focus on compliance can lead to too much of a good thing. Part of the complication is figuring out where to draw the boundary, when is it enough?
In the last decade, DOJ’s Antitrust Division has been following in the footsteps of the Department’s Criminal Division in developing public guidance for companies and executives for navigating internal compliance procedures. This culminated in November 2024 with DOJ’s Antitrust Division publishing its newly minted, “Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs in Criminal Antitrust Investigations,” (the “Guidance”)[1] consisting of inordinately detailed and intrusive business guidelines instructing companies on how the Division believes businesses should go about preventing and detecting misconduct. The Guidance expands on DOJ’s longstanding guidance related to corporate compliance in the same way that the Louisiana Purchase expanded the United States. While the prior guidance was limited to just three questions, the new Guidance dwarfs that at more than 200 questions that prosecutors are supposed to ask themselves — and by extension defense counsel and executives — when judging a company’s compliance program. By contrast, the New York Times only recommends that one asks a potential spouse thirteen questions before getting married,[2] a standard round of Jeopardy is only thirty questions, and even Major League Baseball’s interminable regular season ends after 162 games.
The new Guidance undoubtedly includes some helpful questions, though these largely mirror long-standing compliance guidance. For example, the Guidance instructs prosecutors to focus on how well the compliance program functions generally (i.e. “[d]oes the compliance program address and prohibit criminal antitrust violations?”) as well as how it performed with respect to the antitrust violation at issue (i.e. “[d]id the compliance program detect and facilitate prompt reporting of the violation?”)[3] It also asks prosecutors to focus on a longstanding priority of DOJ: the extent that a company’s senior management was involved in a violation.[4] These questions are sensible, measurable, and provide companies with at least some measure of compliance direction.
Additionally, the Guidance admirably attempts to modernize prosecutors’ and by extension companies’ approach to compliance, asking them to consider novel and thorny issues involving the use of artificial intelligence and retaining ephemeral messaging.[5] This is consistent with recent DOJ statements highlighting its continued focus on developing expertise in determining whether evolving technology is being used to facilitate collusion.[6] But like the Cheesecake Factory’s sprawling menu,[7] when you reach entrée number fifty you are bound to encounter some duds.
For example, should prosecutors really delve into the exact format of compliance reports made to senior leadership?[8] Do prosecutors need to tackle whether a company experiences “cultural, linguistic, or other barriers to implementing the company’s antitrust compliance polices,” with respect to its foreign subsidiaries?[9] And should it matter who “is the lowest level employee who must receive antitrust compliance training?”[10] After reading this guidance, one might be struck with yet another question: Is all this necessary?
Putting aside the considerable length and redundancy of the Guidance, it also poses a challenge to the competence of any prosecutor. Federal antitrust prosecutors tend to be highly trained lawyers with significant experience in investigating and prosecuting antitrust violations. They are supervised by those similarly situated. They are not business leaders. By training and experience, they have not had to make the difficult decisions business leaders are forced to make when weighing the benefits of a compliance program to its costs. But the Guidance places prosecutors in exactly this position. Making matters worse, the Guidance provides no advice for prosecutors as to how these 200 questions should be weighed against each other. Do some of these factors count more than others? How should conflicting factors be integrated? The Guidance provides no instruction.
The November 2024 compliance publication is the embodiment of previous administrations’ excessive focus on compliance. To be fair, this focus comes from an understandable position. Corporate prosecutions are tough. It can take years to sift through emails and messages, interview and develop cooperating witnesses, and ultimately charge corporate defendants. The defense bar is a fierce one and DOJ turnover, among other factors, can slow investigations. In that context, it makes sense why DOJ would prefer to have prosecutors and companies focus on compliance programs which—theoretically at least—should reduce the time and resources necessary to prosecute corporate collusion. But taken to its extreme, this focus—embodied in this 200-question corporate survey—does not necessarily further DOJ’s goals. It certainly does not make life any easier for most business leaders who are conscientiously trying to manage compliance concerns with limited resources. This is particularly the case for foreign companies who can find themselves in DOJ’s crosshairs. These companies may be far less accustomed to DOJ’s existing corporate enforcement practices and be particularly burdened if not bewildered by the thorny thickets of this compliance guidance.
Instead of proliferating even more detailed guidance about how business leaders should run their businesses, DOJ should stick to what it does best: investigating and enforcing the current antitrust laws on the books.
How it all started was, a decade ago, with good intentions, the DOJ sought to recognize compliance efforts and incentivize companies to devote more legal spend to ward off the axis of antitrust evil — price fixing, bid rigging and market allocation. This mission was exemplified in the 2015 U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio settlement in U.S. v Kayaba Industry Co., when the DOJ applied compliance credit against a criminal fine in response to efforts to improve a forward-looking compliance program.[11] By doing so, the DOJ hoped that, in addition to its policy of offering leniency to the first company to self-report antitrust wrongdoing, crediting compliance efforts would further incentivize companies to boost antitrust compliance resources — which could in turn lead to more self-reporting resulting from the enhanced detection of potential problems.
Since then, the gospel of antitrust compliance has spread like creeping kudzu into a cottage industry of compliance experts, academics and, most dreaded of all, monitors who seek to make a living out of whipping businesses into shape. Businesses have been forced to make hard choices about devoting limited resources to antitrust compliance, perhaps at the expense of other equally important competing compliance needs, such as human trafficking, anti-corruption, money laundering, sanctions, or data privacy and protection.
In the B.C.E., or Before Compliance Era, the DOJ managed to do its job of ensuring businesses played by the rules without the need to ask businesses to answer hundreds of smothering questions. It did this by laser-focusing its efforts on finding out whether a crime occurred and whether it had the required proof to bring a case. Now, the DOJ is pressing businesses on inquires such as: “How is attendance at training recorded and preserved?” and “Have the board of directors and/or external auditors held executive or private sessions with the compliance and control functions?”[12] Are these really the kind of questions that federal prosecutors should be spending valuable time on and requesting that businesses use precious resources to answer? Are prosecutors even qualified to meaningfully answer these questions and weigh the answers? Is any benefit of such excessive questioning outweighed by the harm it produces?
For example, there’s scant research to show antitrust compliance programs even work or at least justify the huge amount of time and money DOJ expects companies to devote to the effort. According to Drata’s compliance trends report for 2025, 74% of organizations report that compliance overall is a burden, and they are not able to properly address vulnerabilities due to limited budgets and resources.[13] In addition, according to that same Drata report, 76% of companies that use point-in-time compliance argue the related effort poses a burden.[14] And according to NorthRow’s State of Compliance Trends 2023 report, on average, 25% of business revenue is spent on compliance costs.[15] That is an astronomical amount, a quarter of all revenue, to be spent on compliance.
As with any significant spending decision, companies must reasonably ask themselves: what’s the return on investment?
One way for companies to answer that question is to look at whether DOJ has actually provided benefits to companies for robust compliance programs. But in the last ten years, since Kayaba, there have been few, if any, examples of DOJ at least publicly crediting a company’s compliance program in connection with a corporate resolution. In other words, there is little evidence that DOJ is offering any “carrot” or benefit at all in connection with a functioning compliance program.
Companies also could look to see if DOJ is actually wielding a stick. In other words, if DOJ was applying sanctions in the form of fines and jail time — e.g., the massive convictions and fines the DOJ obtained in investigations of the air transportation ($1.8 Billion), automotive parts ($2.9 Billion), and Korean oil refinery ($365 Million) sectors from 2007 through 2019 — companies would naturally sit up, take note, and shift scarce legal resources to preventing or detecting antitrust violations. Those convictions and fines were levied against multi-national companies that were involved in long-running antitrust conspiracies that affected tens of millions of consumers and the U.S. government. And they provided a clear message to companies.
But in recent times, there have been no major investigations resulting in convictions and fines like the ones mentioned above, nor incentives offered, giving companies little reason to act. And the DOJ’s newly invigorated whistleblower program could only muddy the waters. In January 2026, DOJ announced its first-ever whistleblower reward, a $1 million reward to an individual whistleblower, while the targeted company EBLOCK paid a $3.28 million fine.[16] Penalties of these sizes seem unlikely to motivate companies to invest millions in enhanced compliance. Moreover, a focus on incentivizing whistleblowers potentially could reduce the value of leniency.
The whistleblower program promises a potential whistleblower fifteen to thirty percent of any fine ultimately collected. But even the best designed corporate compliance programs do not offer those sorts of incentives. Imagine an altruistic company employee comes across an email or overhears a conversation suggesting collusive behavior with a competitor. That employee could choose to report that information internally to a supervisor or compliance officer. But where’s the reward in that? Instead, if that employee runs to DOJ, that employee could be entitled to millions in compensation. A corporate compliance program only functions if company employees are incentivized to report misconduct internally, but DOJ’s whistleblower program incentivizes company employees to report externally. These incentives are compounded by the lack of a corporate leniency safety valve in the whistleblower program: there is no grace period for companies to self-report following a whistleblower report. Notably, while the Antitrust Division program does not allow for such a grace period, its cousin, DOJ’s Criminal Division corporate whistleblower program does. That program still provides leniency eligibility for companies that voluntarily self-report within 120 days of a whistleblower report.[17] The Antitrust Division should follow this example.
In sum, DOJ is promoting a whistleblower program that actively undermines the efficacy of corporate compliance programs and also provides fewer incentives for companies to self-report. Under these circumstances, what incentives does a company have to invest significant resources in corporate compliance?
In the absence of the carrot of compliance and the stick of convictions, compounded by the uncertain implications of a new whistleblower program, the compliance landscape remains murky. Instead, the burden has been placed on businesses to spend precious time and resources wading through a swamp of questions, hoping they don’t sink in the process. At this unfortunate point, the tail appears to be wagging the dog.
This situation begs one more question: What is the real intent of such an inordinately long list of questions, that cause extra work for businesses and may not benefit the DOJ or consumers in any material way? One could reasonably harbor the concern that this has become less an exercise in guidance and deterrence and more of a patronizing game of “gotcha” guidance, giving prosecutors a hook on which they can hang their hat to say, “Sorry, but we can’t give you credit for your compliance program because your program failed to consider the following questions….” After all, in more than 200-question test seeking open-ended answers—most of which have no objectively correct answer—the possibilities for error are abundant. And the likelihood of inconsistent applications of this compliance Rorschach are almost guaranteed.
Companies should be trusted to ask and answer questions about their businesses without undue interference and second guessing from the government. Less onerous questions and more examples of compliance success stories would be helpful, too.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1376686/dl
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/23/fashion/weddings/marriage-questions.html
[3] Guidance at 4.
[4] Id.
[5] Guidance at 6, 9-10.
[6] https://shorturl.at/1y9Pa
[7] https://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu
[8] Guidance at 5.
[9] Guidance at 11.
[10] Id.
[11] See Mem. & Mot. for Downward Departure at 11, United States v. Kayaba Indus. Co., Ltd., No. 15-CR-00098 (S.D. Ohio Oct. 5, 2015). See also https://www.law360.com/articles/714185/lightning-strikes-twice-doj-gives-2nd-compliance-credit.
[12] Guidance at 7, 11.
[13] DRATA is an AI-native trust management and compliance automation platform that assists companies in monitoring compliance and, among other things, collects and compiles compliance data (https://drata.com/blog/compliance-statistics).
[14] Id.
[15] https://25597772.fs1.hubspotusercontent-eu1.net/hubfs/25597772/eBooks/Compliance%20trends%20report%202023.pdf
[16] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/antitrust-division-and-us-postal-service-award-first-ever-1m-payment-whistleblower-reporting
[17] https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-division-corporate-whistleblower-awards-pilot-program
Mark Rosman is a Partner and Cameron Tepfer is an Associate at Proskauer Rose LLP.
The views, opinions and positions expressed within all posts are those of the author(s) alone and do not represent those of the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement (PCCE) or of the New York University School of Law. PCCE makes no representations as to the accuracy, completeness and validity or any statements made on this site and will not be liable any errors, omissions or representations. The copyright of this content belongs to the author(s) and any liability with regards to infringement of intellectual property rights remains with the author(s).
