Who Owns a Patent from College or University Research in India? Student, Professor or Institution

A company wants to license a technology your institution patented three years ago. Their lawyer sends a short email: please share the chain of title from the named inventors to the university.

There is no chain of title. Four inventors were named. Two have graduated and left the country. One works for a competitor. Nobody ever signed anything.

That email is how a lot of Indian institutions discover what their patent portfolio is actually worth. In 2024-25 educational institutions filed 37,894 patent applications in India, up from 23,543 the previous year, out of a national total of 110,375 (CGPDTM Annual Report 2024-25). The filing has scaled. The ownership paperwork behind it often has not.

Quick answer

Under Section 6 of the Patents Act, 1970, only three categories of person may apply for a patent in India: the true and first inventor, the assignee of the inventor's right to apply, and the legal representative of a deceased person entitled to apply.

An institution is not on that list by virtue of being an institution. India has no work-for-hire rule for patents. Nothing in the Patents Act transfers an employee's or a student's invention to the employer or the college.

Compare Section 17(c) of the Copyright Act, 1957: "in the case of a work made in the course of the author's employment under a contract of service or apprenticeship... the employer shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright therein."

That contrast is the whole problem. Your institution probably owns the copyright in the paper. Without a signed assignment it very likely does not own the patent on the invention the paper describes.

Inventor and applicant are different people

Almost every campus dispute traces back to a confusion between these two words.

The inventor is a question of fact: whoever conceived the invention as claimed. The Act does not define "true and first inventor" positively at all. Section 2(1)(y) tells you only who it is not — the definition "does not include either the first importer of an invention into India, or a person to whom an invention is first communicated from outside India."

The applicant is a question of entitlement: whoever may apply under Section 6, and whose name goes on the register.

An institution can perfectly properly be the applicant while a 22-year-old M.Tech student is the sole named inventor. That combination is normal and correct. What makes it lawful is the assignment underneath it.

Form 1 forces the question into the open. It asks whether all the inventors are the same as the applicants. If they are not, the inventors must sign a declaration reading: "I/We, the above named inventor(s) is/are the true & first inventor(s) for this Invention and declare that the applicant(s) herein is/are my/our assignee or legal representative."

Someone has to sign that. If the student will not, no internal circular solves it.

Being named as inventor is recognition, not ownership. Section 28 says so in terms, and allows a request or a claim to be mentioned only before grant. Since the Patents (Amendment) Rules, 2024, Rule 70A separately lets an inventor request a certificate of inventorship on Form 8A for a patent in force, for ₹900 on e-filing — useful for a scholar whose institution is the applicant and who needs proof of contribution for a promotion, fellowship or visa file.

One thing does not make anyone an inventor: paying for it. Funding the work, supervising it or providing the lab are not acts of invention. The High Court of Mysore made the point in 1958 in V.B. Mohammed Ibrahim v. Alfred Schafranek, holding that a person who merely finances an invention is not on that account its inventor.

Adding a Head of Department to the inventor list as a courtesy is therefore not harmless. It is a false statement on Form 1, and Section 64(1)(j) makes a patent revocable where it "was obtained on a false suggestion or representation".

Why patents work differently from copyright

Section 6(1) is short. Any person claiming to be the true and first inventor may apply; so may the assignee of that person's right to make the application; so may the legal representative of a deceased person who was entitled to apply immediately before death.

No fourth clause for employers, and none for universities. The Copyright Act, drafted thirteen years earlier, does exactly what the Patents Act declines to do.

Indian courts have rarely been asked to settle employer ownership of patents. The best-known engagement is Darius Rutton Kavasmaneck v. Gharda Chemicals Ltd., a shareholder's derivative action in the Bombay High Court alleging that the managing director had taken patents in his own name that belonged to the company. At the interim stage in 2014 the Court declined to restrain him, no duty to invent for the company having been made out. That is an interlocutory decision in a company-law dispute, not a ruling on academic IP — but it points where the statute points. An Indian court will not assume the employer's title. It looks for the document that created it.

Is a student even an employee?

This is the sharper question, and where most institutional claims are weakest.

A student pays the institution. The institution does not pay the student. There is no contract of service, no appointment letter, no salary. Whatever else a degree candidate is, they are not an employee, and the arguments an institution might borrow from employment law do not reach them at all.

We have not found any reported Indian judgment deciding whether a student's invention vests in their college. As far as our research goes the point is untested here, and we are not going to reach for American or European cases and present them as though they bound an Indian registrar.

So the institution's claim over a student invention is contractual or nothing, and the question for a dean of research is not "what does the law say" but: did this student sign anything at admission, project registration or thesis submission that assigns inventions to the institution; is it specific enough to satisfy Section 68; and does it cover inventions made after they leave?

A scholar on a JRF or SRF stipend, or a project assistant paid from a grant, sits in between. There is usually an appointment letter, which makes the relationship look more like employment. But even for a clear employee, Indian patent law transfers nothing automatically. The appointment letter still has to say so.

What a valid assignment requires

Section 68 sets a higher bar than most institutions assume. An assignment of a patent or a share in it, a mortgage, a licence or the creation of any other interest "shall not be valid unless the same were in writing and the agreement between the parties concerned is reduced to the form of a document embodying all the terms and conditions governing their rights and obligations and duly executed."

Three substantive requirements. In writing — an email or a committee minute is not an assignment. A document embodying all the terms and conditions — a one-line clause in a student handbook saying "all IP belongs to the Institute" is a policy statement, and whether it meets this test is at best arguable. Duly executed — signed by the assignor, which brings you back to the student who has already graduated.

Timing decides which document you need. Before filing, what is assigned is the right to apply, which is what Section 6(1)(b) refers to and what must be signed before Form 1 goes in. After grant, what is assigned is the patent itself, and the deed is recorded against the patent number. Getting the first signed at the right moment costs an hour. Reconstructing it four years later, from four people in three countries, can cost a licensing deal.

Proof of right, substitution and recordal

On proof of right, the Delhi High Court gave institutions a useful steer recently. In Nippon Steel Corporation v. The Controller of Patents (C.A.(COMM.IPD-PAT) 10/2025), the Court held that an employment agreement signed by the employee-inventor is an acceptable document to satisfy Section 7(2), read together with supporting declarations and the organisation's IP policy. The inventor there had died before the objection was raised. The lesson is not that a policy document alone will do. It is that a signed agreement plus a written institutional IP policy is the combination that survives, and the signature has to be obtained while the inventor is still there to give it.

On recordal, Section 69(5) is the sting: a document not entered in the register "shall not be admitted by the Controller or by any court as evidence of title... unless the Controller or the court, for reasons to be recorded in writing, otherwise directs." An unrecorded assignment is not void, but it may not be usable to prove that you own the thing you are trying to license or enforce. Recordal on Form 16 costs ₹1,600 per patent on e-filing for a natural person, startup, small entity or educational institution, and ₹8,000 for others. Against unusable title in a negotiation, that is not a real number.

The novelty trap

This is the most useful section for a working researcher, and the one most often got wrong on campus.

Publication before filing destroys novelty. Section 29 onwards deals with anticipation, and the Indian grace period is far narrower than most academics believe.

Section 31 is not a general twelve-month grace period. It protects four situations only:

• (a) display of the invention, with the true and first inventor's consent, "at an industrial or other exhibition to which the provisions of this section have been extended by the Central Government by notification in the Official Gazette", or use for that exhibition where it is held;
• (b) publication of a description of the invention in consequence of that display or use;
• (c) unauthorised use by someone else after such display and during the exhibition;
• (d) "the description of the invention in a paper read by the true and first inventor before a learned society or published with his consent in the transactions of such a society",

with the application filed not later than twelve months after the opening of the exhibition or the reading or publication of the paper.

Read clause (a) again. The exhibition must be one the Central Government has notified in the Official Gazette. A college tech fest is not that.

Read clause (d) again. It covers a paper read by the inventor before a learned society, or published with consent in the transactions of that society. It does not obviously cover a journal article, a preprint, a conference proceedings paper published without a reading, a poster session, a thesis in a repository, a demo-day pitch or a LinkedIn post.

The Patents (Amendment) Rules, 2024 inserted Rule 29A and Form 31 for a request to avail the grace period, at ₹500 on e-filing for a natural person, startup, small entity or educational institution and ₹2,500 for others, supported by the earliest date of disclosure and documentary evidence. That is a procedural clarification, not a widening of the ground. Form 31 gives you a way to invoke Section 31. It does not give you a Section 31 you did not have.

Section 32 separately protects public working in India within one year before priority where it was "for the purpose of reasonable trial only" — narrow, and aimed at trials rather than dissemination.

The sequencing rule belongs in every institutional policy: file the provisional before the thesis is submitted, before the paper is sent, before the poster goes up and before the project is demonstrated in public. PhD theses in India are routinely deposited in the UGC's Shodhganga repository, which exists to make them openly accessible. Once a thesis is there, the disclosure has happened. Our companion guide on patenting an idea without disclosing it too early sets out the sequencing in detail.

What happens when there is no policy, and the deadlock it creates

Strip away the assumption and here is the actual position of an institution with no written policy and no signed assignments.

Ownership defaults to the inventors. The people who conceived the invention hold the right to apply. If several conceived it, they hold it jointly.

An institution named as applicant without a valid assignment is exposed on three fronts. Sections 25(1)(a) and 25(2)(a) allow pre-grant and post-grant opposition on the ground that the applicant or patentee "wrongfully obtained the invention or any part thereof". Section 64(1)(b) makes a patent revocable where it "was granted on the application of a person not entitled under the provisions of this Act to apply therefor", and Section 64(1)(c) where it "was obtained wrongfully in contravention of the rights of the petitioner". Section 52 then allows the true inventor to be granted a fresh patent carrying the same date and number as the one revoked.

Co-ownership without an agreement is a commercial dead end. This is the part that surprises deans. Section 50 gives each of two or more grantees an equal undivided share and lets each work the invention for their own benefit without accounting to the others. Then Section 50(3): "A licence under the patent shall not be granted and share in the patent shall not be assigned by one of such persons except with the consent of the other person or persons."

So four co-owners can each independently manufacture the product, and none of them can license it without the agreement of all four. A patent that cannot be licensed is not an asset a technology transfer office can do anything with.

The statutory escape hatches are slow. Section 51 lets the Controller give directions to registered co-owners about sale, lease or licensing, and empower someone to execute a document for a co-owner who fails to do so within fourteen days of written notice. Section 20(5) does something comparable for joint applicants who cannot agree while an application is pending. No corporate licensee enjoys hearing that the chain of title will be completed by an application to the Controller.

A worked example of the deadlock

This scenario is hypothetical. It illustrates how the provisions above interact and does not describe any MYCrave client.

A state technical university files on a low-cost water testing device from a final-year M.Tech project. Four inventors are named — three students and their guide — and the university is sole applicant. Nobody signs an assignment. Four years later the patent is granted, and a water utility asks for an exclusive licence for two states. Their counsel asks for the assignments.

Three options, none quick:

• Locate all four and paper it now. One student is doing a PhD in Germany. One works for a competing instrumentation company whose own employment agreement may claim his inventions. One is contactable and willing. The guide has retired. The assignments must satisfy Section 68, then be recorded on Form 16.
• Apply to the Controller. Section 51 directions run against registered co-owners, and the register here shows one applicant whose title is the thing in doubt.
• Renegotiate. The utility takes a non-exclusive licence at a lower royalty, or walks.

Meanwhile renewal fees fall due, and a patent nobody clearly owns is a patent nobody clearly has to pay for. All of it was avoidable by four signatures on one afternoon in the students' final semester.

Funded research and the missing Bayh-Dole

Institutions often assume the funding agency has settled ownership. Usually it has done the opposite.

SERB, now under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, directs grantee institutions in its extramural terms and conditions to follow their own institute guidelines for patenting and copyright, and to send SERB a copy of any application. Joint IP with an industrial partner is to be owned as mutually agreed in writing. There is no revenue-sharing formula and no clause vesting title in the funder.

DBT issued IP Guidelines in 2023. For extramural competitive grants, IP is owned by the grantee institution. Every DBT-funded institute is expected to have an institutional IP committee to advise on filing, status, transfer and licensing, and licences are expected to preserve the Government of India's march-in rights, including the compulsory licence route under the Patents Act.

Notice what both do. They point back at your institutional policy. If you do not have one, the funder's condition has nothing to attach to.

India has no Bayh-Dole Act. The nearest attempt was the Protection and Utilisation of Public Funded Intellectual Property Bill, 2008, introduced in the Rajya Sabha on 15 December 2008, referred to a Standing Committee that reported on 28 June 2010, and withdrawn from the Rajya Sabha on 8 December 2014. It would have required disclosure of new IP to the government within sixty days and guaranteed inventors a minimum of 30% of net royalties. As at the review date of this guide no successor legislation has passed. There is no statute filling the gap. There is only your policy.

What a workable IP policy contains, and what institutions actually pay

Ten parts, each of which a licensee's counsel will look for.

Revenue sharing in practice

There is no standard Indian split, and anyone who tells you there is one is guessing. Here is what published policies of well-known Indian institutions actually say.

Two things matter more than the headline percentage. Define the base: 60% of net revenue, after the institution recovers all filing, prosecution and renewal costs, can be worth less than a lower percentage of gross. And decide the shape deliberately — a flat 70:30 rewards the first success, while a tier shifting towards the institution at higher revenue funds the next twenty filings.

A checklist for this month

• Pull every patent application your institution has filed and, for each, find the signed assignment from every named inventor. Where there is none, mark it. That list is your real risk register.
• Stop the bleeding on new filings. No Form 1 goes out without a signed assignment of the right to apply from every named inventor, in a standalone document.
• Add the assignment to four documents — admission form, appointment letter, project registration form, thesis submission form — with an obligation to execute further documents after leaving.
• Publish a one-page disclosure rule, a named recipient office and a publication embargo written into the academic calendar, so supervisors plan filing dates around viva dates rather than the reverse.
• Chase the recordals. Where assignments exist but were never recorded, file Form 16 now, and read your live SERB, DBT, ICMR, DST and AICTE grant conditions to see what each assumes your policy says.
• Then write the policy, drafted against real problems in your own files rather than copied from another institution's website.

How MYCrave can help

MYCrave Consultancy & Services works with institutions through its IP Cell programme, which has run 4,200+ seminars and workshops across 21+ states. Patent prosecution is led by a Registered Patent Agent (No. 5509).

On an institutional file that means:

• A title audit — every named inventor on every application matched against the assignments actually on file, producing the gap list
• Drafting the instruments — the right-to-apply assignment, the post-grant deed, and the four campus forms that capture consent at admission, appointment, project registration and thesis submission, followed by Section 69 recordal on Form 16
• An institutional IP policy drafted against your own files — ownership rule, disclosure form, decision window, release-back clause, revenue split, embargo and carve-outs
• Invention disclosure review and prior art searching, with filing sequenced so provisionals land before viva, thesis and conference deadlines
• Faculty and scholar training through I.N.V.E.N.T. Club sessions, and commercialization support through IP BANK India once title is clean enough to license

Where a portfolio is already compromised, the first step is working out which patents can be repaired and which are not worth the renewal fee. Not every filing should be kept alive.

The document you do not have

A patent portfolio is worth what its chain of title is worth. Filing numbers look good in a ranking submission — the NIRF framework awards 15 of the 100 marks in Research and Professional Practice to patents published and granted — but a licensee's counsel does not read the ranking. They read the register and the assignments.

So do three things before the next filing goes out. Find out how many existing applications have a signed assignment from every named inventor. Stop filing without one. Put a disclosure rule in place that beats the thesis submission deadline. The policy can come afterwards; the signatures cannot.

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