A company has asked me about rights to intellectual property resulting from projects they sponsor. What is SMUs position on intellectual property?
Our Intellectual Property Policy establishes that SMU owns intellectual property resulting from sponsored projects. The Standard Research Agreement includes SMU’s basic position on intellectual property rights. Investigators should be familiar with SMU’s processes for administering Intellectual Property Policy starting with the inventor’s obligation to disclose inventions to SMU by filing invention disclosure forms. In general, we are receptive to negotiating with companies regarding their needs to have rights to use the intellectual property resulting from the projects they sponsor. Our primary objectives in these negotiations are to preserve your rights to publish, to meet SMU’s compliance obligations, and to protect our non-profit status. Our objectives and the company’s needs can usually be accommodated by negotiating amendments to the Standard Research Agreement (of when necessary, an agreement put forward by the company). As stated earlier, these negotiations can be lengthy and d
