The government will generally have some rights to any IP produced by a company under any arrangement with a DOE laboratory. If there is joint inventorship or authorship by employees of both parties, the patents and copyrights are jointly owned. In work done by a subcontractor, IP may be owned by the subcontractor subject to certain rights of the U.S. Government. At LLNL inventors submit a disclosure and record of invention to the Patent Group. Generally the party doing the filing pays the costs.
Priority is given to cases that have active or prospective licenses.
Because of the high costs, foreign filings usually are undertaken only if a licensee pays costs. UC will sometimes do a speculative foreign filing to preserve foreign rights to an important case until a licensee is found. Generally, data produced at government expense will not be protected. For the last four years, it has focused on cleaning up environmental problems. Provides wide range of special engineering processes to government and to petroleum, agricultural, construction and various processing industries.