Who owns UL Lafayette employee inventions?
It depends upon the circumstances under which the invention is made. The general rule is that anything an employee invents belongs to UL Lafayette, regardless of time of the day, day of the week, or month of the year; and regardless of whether UL Lafayette equipment and other resources were used when the invention was conceived or reduced to practice. For example, if a professor of chemistry at UL Lafayette were to invent a disease-resistant tomato on a Saturday night while on vacation at a Florida beach, without using any UL Lafayette personnel or facilities, that invention still belongs to UL Lafayette. A student is treated as an UL Lafayette employee for these purposes when acting in the course of his/her employment. While each case will depend on its own facts, graduate students are usually treated as UL Lafayette employees for this purpose, while undergraduate students usually are not.
Related Questions
- Who owns an invention made on an employees own time, without use of UL Lafayette facilities or funds, and that is in an area or field that has nothing to do with his/her UL Lafayette position?
- If an employee of UL Lafayette and an employee of an outside company or university invent something jointly, who owns the invention?
- Who owns patents at UL Lafayette?
