This article belongs to: Your Intellectual Property Rights
What are your Intellectual Property Rights?
Save your Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)!
Who owns the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in a project funded by a Marie Curie Action? The basic rule is: Intellectual property generated during a project remains the property of the participating organisations. You find more detailed information in the Guide for IPR in FP7 projects 
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Why do Intellectual Property Rights matter?
IPR can also be a source of future income if properly managed, as they promote commercialisation of results. As a participant, you should pay attention to the management of IP issues from the very beginning of your project. You should be aware of what you bring to the project before the project starts ("background") and which results you want to get ("foreground").
When do IPR matter?
IPR matter in all phases of a project, from the proposal stage to the dissemination of the results.
Brief introduction to the IPR terminology:
- Background: Information & knowledge (including inventions, databases, etc.) held by participants prio to their accession to the Grant Agreement of a project.
- Foreground: Results, including information, materials, knowledge, generated in a project. Foreground includes the tangible (e.g. prototypes) and intangible (IPR) of a project.
- Access rights: Licenses or user rights to foreground or background given by owners of this foreground or background to other parties.
- Use: Direct or indirect utilisation of foreground in further research activities other than covered by the project, or for developing a product or a process.
- Dissemination: Spreading of foreground to a wider audience by appropriate means (seminars, conferences, web sites, etc.), enabling different organisations to learn from others' experiences.
- Grant Agreement: The Grant Agreement is the contract between the EC and the participants of the project. The GA establishes the main rights and obligations of the participants amongst themselves and towards the EC.
Definition of Partner types
- Participant/beneficiary: Legal entity taking part in a project and having rights and obligations defined by the EC Grant Agreement.
- Consortium: All the participants of a given project.
- Third party: A legal entity which does not participate in the given project (but may participate in another FP7 project)
- Legal entity: As defined by the EC, a legal entity is a company, a university or a research centre. Only legal entities can be participants in a FP7 project. As a consequence, individual researchers or departments of a university are not considered as participants.
- Coordinator: is the person appointed by the other participants of the project who is responsible for contacts with the EC and in charge if the scientific, financial and administrative coordination of the project.
