According to statistics from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, a degree can increase the earning potential of graduates in the UK by an estimated £165,000 for men and £250,000 for women over the course of their working lives. So, why do many of the most successful inventors and entrepreneurs of our time leave college or university once they’ve stumbled upon an initial big idea? One contributing factor is the small matter of whom the intellectual property and revenue of those ideas belongs to.

IP and undergraduates in the UK

It makes sense that the rights of ideas and innovations uncovered by researchers and postgraduates employed by universities would at the very least be shared by the educational establishments in question. What may come as a surprise however, is that generally speaking this is also the case for undergraduates. Should an undergraduate student generate a money-spinning concept while completing their course they may be asked to share the intellectual property rights and split or handover all of the intellectual property to their university or college. Conduct a quick internet search on “undergraduate students intellectual property rights” and what you’ll see pop up is a number of policies published by universities on the topic. With this in mind, it’s perhaps no surprise that students with a creative side sometimes leave education mid-way through courses. Equally, it must be recognised that revenue recognises the fact that students will have used university resources and perhaps research to develop these concepts.

IP and undergraduates in the US

The revenue and rights situation is very similar in the US where some students are trying to ensure the revenue share schemes that are put in place are fair to the students who come up with money-generating ideas. This article looks at recent efforts by Caleb Carr at the University of Colorado-­Denver to secure a split that more heavily favours students who have the ideas in the first place. The fear is that by demanding large shares of rights and revenues, universities may put students off from sharing ideas in the first place – leading undergraduates to omit their best ideas from development while in education.

University staff and IP rights

Even if someone is employed by a university, the university may not be entitled to a share of the rights of inventions made during that employment if the role in question was clearly outlined as the role of a researcher rather than an innovator and many IP cases have been fought on this basis. Furthermore, different universities and colleges set IP rights and revenue shares with staff at different levels, which also come into dispute from time to time, particularly if the establishment in question decides to amend their policy at a later date.

Often, having the support of a university can help inventors to patent their product and bring it to market but even where this support is not supplied, universities may decide to tap in and reclaim their share at a later date. One famous example of this is the US case of John Fenn versus Yale University. In the 90s Professor Fenn invented the Mass Spectrometer, which later won him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Initially his employers Yale waived their IP rights to the invention but a dispute broke out at a later date over what information the professor had initially disclosed to the university and much legal to-ing and fro-ing ensued.

Schools and intellectual property

In a world where funding for education is tight, it’s not just higher education that’s touched by intellectual property controversy. In 2013 in the US an online petition was launched to counter one school board’s plans to claim ownership over the work of its students and teachers. You can find out more about the case in this Wired.co.uk article, but while the school’s scenario was largely suggested to net profits from potential technological developments made in the classroom rather than finger paintings and word searches, the suggestion was that children wouldn’t have ownership over work produced in the classroom.

If you’re a current student or university employee and you don’t know where rights would sit with a project you’re working on at the moment or have worked on in the past, you can try searching for your college or university’s intellectual property policy online or get in touch with London IP and we’ll be happy to offer you a free consultation.