If you have not filled one out yet, please click here and fill out the form. Our Position Doing research without protection of an agreement puts us at risk of receiving no credit or benefit for our inventions. If we contest a patent that somebody else has filed, we might win it, but more likely all that will happen is that nobody will want to commercialize it. So, some agreement, even if it is not perfect, is better than no agreement. Ultimately, all graduate employees should be protected by an intellectual property agreement that favours us.
Background Imagine a Chinese student from one of the top engineering schools in China.
Statistically, since she is from a top school in the most populous country in the world, her academic skills are among the best worldwide. Without working too hard, at the end of the first semester, she is the best student in her class and several professors invite her to join their research projects. Three years later she is half way into her program of study because most of her time is spent on her advisor's research which is interesting and educational, but not directly related to the research for her dissertation. At the end of the fifth year, this student and her advisor invent a chemical process that the oil industry can use to save millions of dollars in refining costs. After the contributing doctoral student has returned to China, this professor begins to receive royalty payments for hundreds of thousands of dollars.