A Warning to Student Entrepreneurs

Trying to start a business as a student can lead to lawsuits by your university -- or even, perhaps, to the chain gang, warns soon-to-be law professor Brian Love:

Over the last three decades, patent acquisition and technology licensing have become big business for US universities, which collectively obtain thousands of patents and billions in licensing revenue each year. In a never-ending quest for more royalties, university officials are increasingly likely to take and market not just the inventions of fulltime faculty members, but also those of their students.

Unlike professors, however, students generally don’t sign patent assignment agreements, are far from business savvy, and usually pay large sums to, rather than are paid by, their future alma maters. Nonetheless, under the authority of broad policies buried in student handbooks, university officials routinely lay claim to the discoveries of tuition-paying students who unwittingly erred by inventing something of value on campus.

Read more from the Boston Globe .

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