Website Search
Find information on spaces, staff, and services.
Find information on spaces, staff, and services.
The intellectual property you produce while at a university or in the workplace is subject to contractual agreements and/or institutional policies in addition to broader legal frameworks.
This section introduces some of the policies and regulations that may affect you, especially if you work or study at UW-Madison. Every institution or organization will have different policies, so it’s important to seek out resources relevant to you.
If you are not a member of the UW-Madison community, this section provides examples of the types of policies to be aware of in the contexts in which you generate intellectual property. These include legal policies, industry agreements, organizational policies, and funding agency requirements.
This section focuses on IP at UW-Madison, but the way we deal with intellectual property may involve all the contexts in which we operate. Practices vary among disciplines. For example, legal scholarship tends to include lengthy quotations and extensive citations. In some other social sciences, authors can reference and summarize another scholar’s work more broadly. While at UW-Madison, our work is also governed by policies at the UW System level.
Throughout your career, expect to check with peers and colleagues for advice and direction about the various IP contexts you should be keeping in mind.
The University maintains a listing of current IP policies: IP Policies and Forms. The rest of this lesson will highlight policies and practices that are most likely to impact you as a student.
In general, the university does not claim copyright in work generated by students in their independent research or coursework. When a student creates copyrightable content as part of an employment arrangement, however, the copyright may belong to the university (specifically, the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System).
When creating copyrightable work as part of a larger research effort or as part of a fellowship, assistantship, or other paid position, you cannot assume that you will retain copyright in the work. If you want to ensure you retain copyright for a particular project, ask your supervisor to document your shared understanding.
As a graduate student, you may create instructional content for courses you teach or support. The copyright in instructional materials are retained by the author unless their creation required substantial university resources such as “direct investment by the university of funds or staff, or the purchase of special equipment for the project; use of multimedia production personnel and facilities; or extraordinary use of computing resources.”
This policy is detailed in UW System Administrative Policy 191.
University of Wisconsin – Madison policy around intellectual property works differently for inventions—including both patentable and copyrightable inventions, such as computer software—than for published research and artistic output. Due to a mix of federal laws, university policies, and funder requirements, determining who owns the intellectual property for inventions created at UW-Madison can be a complicated process. The important thing to keep in mind is that faculty, staff, and students are not individually responsible for sorting through the process–they are required to report inventions via the Innovation Disclosure process.
The following section discusses why intellectual property rights to university inventions are so complicated and how the required Innovation Disclosure process works.
University policy is as follows:
In other words, UW-Madison faculty, staff, and students own the intellectual property associated with their research with exceptions for funded research and other UW-Madison policy considerations. Notably, UW-Madison research is often directly or indirectly tied to federal funding or other funding agreements, as well as other relevant Board of Regents policies, so exceptions are common. In cases of research fully or partially federally-funded, faculty, staff, and students are obligated to assign their intellectual property rights to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the independent, non-profit technology transfer office for UW-Madison.
Often, it can be difficult to determine where federal funding has played a role in campus research. To ensure compliance with federal law and UW-Madison policy, University of Wisconsin – Madison faculty, staff, and students are required to report any invention or discovery:
For more information, visit the Disclosing an Invention website.
To begin the invention reporting process, complete the online Innovation Disclosure Submission on the WARF website. A WARF Intellectual Property Manager will contact you to discuss specifics, and WARF staff will review the invention for commercial application, potential partners, and patentability. WARF staff will forward your Invention Disclosure Report to the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education (VCRGE), which will conduct an equity review for contractual intellectual property obligations, such as federal funding or material transfer agreements.
Broadly speaking, you should file an Innovation Disclosure Submission for any of the following:
Raw data is typically not considered patentable or reportable in itself; however, data is critical supporting material for filing chemistry- and life sciences-derived patent applications. Researchers in these disciplines should disclose only after such data is produced, whereas engineering researchers can disclose earlier in the invention process, during prototyping.
It’s often difficult to identify something you have created as original. Conducting a preliminary patent search can be helpful in determining if others have produced and protected similar inventions. UW-Madison Libraries’ Patent & Trademark Resource Center at Steenbock Library can introduce you to effective patent search strategies. Even if you were to find similar inventions, however, there may be original components to your design and you would be obligated to complete the Innovation Disclosure Submission.
Because of the role that public disclosure plays in patent law (as explained in Lesson 2), you should file your Innovation Disclosure Submission as early as possible so that WARF can advise on how you or others on your team might present or publish on your invention without sacrificing patentability.
You’ve begun to outline your dissertation and plan to include a section that analyzes an image created and published by another scholar. That section won’t make any sense unless you’re able to show the image so your readers can understand what you’re commenting on.
Based on what you now know about intellectual property, which of the following conclusions can you draw?
Copying and distributing an image created by someone else has copyright implications, and dissertations are not exempt from copyright laws.
There’s no university policy that prohibits you from including copies of other researchers’ work in your dissertation as long as you’re clear about which ideas are yours and which are someone else’s (we all stand on the shoulders of giants).
Until you are confidently navigating copyright and fair use decisions, you should seek support from the libraries.
Copying and distributing an image created by someone else has copyright implications, and dissertations are not exempt from copyright laws.
There’s no university policy that prohibits you from including copies of other researchers’ work in your dissertation as long as you’re clear about which ideas are yours and which are someone else’s (we all stand on the shoulders of giants).
Until you are confidently navigating copyright and fair use decisions, you should seek support from the libraries.
Your dissertation relies heavily on research tied to a project in which you, your faculty advisor, and other students collaborated on a new invention. You plan on including details of this invention in the dissertation.
Which of the following actions should you take first?
Innovation disclosure is required even for non-federally-funded projects. The intellectual property managers at WARF and the intellectual property disclosure specialists can help determine the patentability of the invention, compliance with funding agreements, and, if necessary, steps you can take to avoid public disclosure.