Researcher sues Harvard for drug royalties
cen.acs.org
cen.acs.org
That said, I'd love to see their lab notebooks! There's a reason you document the parties who were present. For my fellow junior scientists, remember that keeping good lab records protects you from predatory PIs and from accusations of malfeasance.
I've used both ELog and a numbered paper notebook. Elog is nice because it's indexed and searchable, but I appreciate the ability to think through a problem as I write it out long-hand.
The bad labour market has paradoxically an effect of encouraging lawsuits. When previously you'd have bailed quickly, nowadays you hang on to your job and collect kompromat.
I guess the blog post may be referring to more specific claims in that case that the PhD advisor had a role to look out for the student's best interest, and by cutting the student out of the patent, the advisor was going against that (the court said the advisor had no obligation to look out for the student's financial interest). The student still got paid, although the amount is secret.
Looks like there are a lot of ways to screw people, or ways where people feel like they're getting screwed. Joining patents is one of them because you have to value the contribution of each patent to the mix https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i11/Royalties-suit-against-H...