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At the university where I did my MS, the university owned the IP. Patents were a standard affair: the university owned and paid for the patent, the researcher(
by auxym 8y ago
At the university where I did my MS, the university owned the IP.
Patents were a standard affair: the university owned and paid for the patent, the researcher(s) (including the PI and grad students) got inventorship. In the eventuality of a licensing deal, university would get a 50% cut, the inventors would get the remaining 50%.
It was a significant revenue stream for the university.
- pkaye 8y agoWhen I was a course grader at my university years back, I had to sign a form saying any IP I invented during that time was owned by the university. Yes for grading homework, I have to assign all IP right to them.
- psykotic 8y agoYes, there are lots of famous examples. E.g. John Chowning invented FM synthesis for musical applications but had to assign the patent to Stanford where he worked as a researcher: "The FM patent produced about $22.9 million in royalties for Stanford University (largely via the sale of FM chips for soundcards)." With a patent date of 1975 and a duration of 20 years, they must have received royalties until 1995 off every OPL family chip (used in Ad Lib, Sound Blaster, etc) and all the Yamaha instruments based on FM synthesis (I believe Yamaha had an exclusive license in that market). That's just one particular example I happened to remember, but every tech-focused university probably has a large portfolio of these sorts of patents.
- icebraining 8y agoStanford also owns the original PageRank patent, and licensed it to Google for 1.8 million shares. Apparently they sold those in 2005, earning $336 million.