- because i have no written agreement, umass/tto can't claim ownership.
- instead, they might ask for compensation, which depends on negotiation. they might not ask for any; perhaps just an academic acknowledgment.
- the main struggle against tto is a tug of war between tto and uspto: if i go too broad, uspto can reject the provisional patent; if i go too specific (on any end that can be claimed for sun and beatriz's contribution) tto will get me.
- sun perhaps already lost his IP to umass, which can make my positioning (brought up below) even more reasonable. idk if this is actually true, so worth asking sun in person on friday.
- my plans can be:
- still try to be as general as possible when filing the patent, especially with things that beatriz and sun have contributed to. the argument for being broad for the ground truth (functional assays and biomarkers) is that this is inherently an invention for general use case for all types of brain organoids. key emphasis on brain! (optional, or fallback if organoid cannot be coined in claim. perhaps too general...)
- IMPORTANT BECAUSE I JUST DON'T HAVE TO BE BROAD ACROSS THE BOARD: be more specific about computational implementations aka variables involving just me (longitudinal brightfield/phase-contrast/non-invasive imaging to capture morpology of brain organoids during their growth → binary segmentation → morphology numerical feature extraction → rule-based-qc on numerical feature extraction → model using non-excluded samples x the features to get the ground truth [functional assays, biomarkers, etc]), to balance out the generalizability of the biology front.
- try to get beatriz and sun to be on my side of the situation, or in practicality, the side of the venture. they need to understand that the IP ownership has to be in my name for now, and after the entity creation, the ownership and control under the entity. inventor credit has to go to me fully, not beatriz or sun. they have to understand that this is for the sake of the company. When the company is formed, Sun and Beatriz will, because of their ongoing and potential future involvements in the corporate adventure, have degrees of control over the invention directly through the company. The alternative is to surrender everything to TTO, then they will control both the hardware and the software. This company will be absolutely worthless because they can give the technology to any competitor in the space and we will lose the very thing we are fighting for: growing the venture and helping it succeed despite the competition.
- regarding when to write things down: don't write anything down right now. Just get a sense of what Beatriz and Sun want. Listen to them organically and understand their wants. Don't be aggressive in any language. Discuss things less formally. Don't let them guard themselves up. After I have verbal consensus/agreements and have conglomerated/assembled them from multiple points of understanding, send an email to them collectively or individually to confirm roles with everyone involved. That email exchange, with all the revisions and potential revisions toward the final iteration, can be the written statements. Afterward when the entity is created, everything will be naturally more formalized in the form of contracts for the formal collaboration. At that point, a lawyer needs to be brought into the picture for the strongest possible legal foundation of this venture.
- from now on, anyone i talk to except for beatriz and sun (because again, not to bring their guard up) will need to sign NDAs with me, or they don't talk to me.
- and from now on, any invention that we want to patent should be drafted so that the inventive concept reflects only contributions that don't trigger university participation agreements.
another meeting tomorrow to solidify the betariz co-authorship menu of options polylemma.