Who owns LSU employee inventions?
A. It depends upon the circumstances under which the invention is made. The general rule is that anything an employee invents belongs to LSU, regardless of time of the day, day of the week, or month of the year; and regardless of whether LSU equipment and other resources were used when the invention was conceived or reduced to practice. For example, if a professor of biochemistry at LSU were to invent a disease-resistant tomato on a Saturday night while on vacation at a Florida beach, without using any LSU personnel or facilities, that invention still belongs to LSU. The Bylaws provide a narrow exception for some inventions that are unrelated to the employee’s field of expertise. See the Bylaws for details. A student is treated as an LSU 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 LSU employees for this purpose, while undergraduate students usually are not. Q.
