Your Request for Advice Regarding Your Intellectual Property Rights

Re: Your request for advice regarding your Intellectual Property Rights

Dear Mr Singh,

I thank you for your email describing your individual area of responsibility within the Shell Eco-Car project on which you are working as a team. I understand that you are responsible for the body work of the car, for which you have used fabric and plywood in order to make the car lighter and cheaper to produce.

Firstly, it is vital to establish whether you actually own the intellectual property in your work. This is dependant on the terms of your agreement with the university. We may need to study the agreement that you signed when you first enrolled as a student in the university, or any later agreement regarding the course or your project that you may have signed. For now I will assume that you do own the IP in your work1.0.

It is crucial that you ensure that any person/organisation to whom you or any of your team members may be disclosing any valuable information regarding any aspect of your project are made to sign confidentiality agreements first in order to bind them to it1.1. It is in your interest to ensure this for the project as a whole as well as for information relating to your individual area of responsibility, since you may acquire other IP rights as a joint inventor/designer of other aspects of the car to which you have contributed in addition to your primary responsibility.

The use of plywood or fabric for the body work in itself is highly unlikely to be able to obtain a patent, since as you have mentioned the use of wood or fabric for this purpose is uncommon but not novel in the field, although they have apparently not been used in combination before. The combination in itself does not provide a solution to a problem or involve an inventive step, therefore would probably be ineligible for a patent2.1.You may, however be eligible for other patents as a joint inventor of the other key creative mechanisms of the car that you have significantly contributed to, but regarding which I do not have much further information as they fall under the primary responsibility of your other team members and are hence outside the ambit of this advice letter2.2.

Copyright subsists in your design drawings if they are original3.1. These drawings need to be clearly drawn and have a copyright symbol '©' placed upon the document, along with your name and the date on which the drawings were made. Copyright entitles you to prevent others from copying your design drawings for upto 70 years after your lifetime3.2. However, copyright does