ISSUE OF OWNERSHIP AND AUTHORSHIP OF AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WORK IN THE COURSE OF EMPLOYMENT

Abstract

Employment is described as a master-servant relationship or labour that one has
been engaged to do for which one is being compensated by an employer by Black's
Law Dictionary. The employee is expected to behave in the company's best
interest, but when stipulating the contract's conditions, one of the most frequently
overlooked topics is who is the rightful owner of any intellectual property that is
produced while the person is employed. This article aims to clarify the legal snags
workers may encounter when attempting to assert intellectual property rights
developed during employment from the perspectives of patents, design rights, and
trade secrets/confidential information, employee rights, human rights, consumer
rights, data rights, technology as well as the available legal recourse in Nigeria
in the event of a dispute and the option to commercially exploit this human
ingenuity through licencing agreements and or the transfer and assignment of the
set of exclusive rights granted upon registration where necessary.