How will intellectual property be addressed in the EBI contract?
The ownership of inventions will follow U.S. patent law. Inventions made solely by BP employees in the rented space will be owned by BP, inventions made solely by UCB, LBNL, or the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) employees in their own space will be theirs. Inventions made by at least one inventor from BP and at least one inventor from UCB, UIUC, and/or LBNL will be jointly owned. We proposed that BP have a time-limited first right to negotiate an exclusive license to IP arising from specific research scopes of work funded by BP through the EBI. This is standard practice for industry-sponsored research at research universities. Alternatively, BP could elect to obtain a nonexclusive license on a royalty-free basis. In either case, BP will be required to diligently develop and commercialize the licensed right to address the relevant market need. Any IP that BP does not license within the time-limited period may be offered to other companies. Finally, even if IP rights a
