Tech firms team up with big universities. Guidelines developed for shared research, mediating intellectual property disputes

Some of Silicon Valley’s largest firms, including Intel Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., joined forces with big-name universities like UC Berkeley and Stanford on Monday, announcing a new set of guidelines intended to expedite research collaborations on new technology and eliminate legal wranglings over intellectual property rights.

Initially, the guidelines will cover open-source research, detailing how discoveries from such work should be shared among the parties and with the public, said Louis Masi, manager of the university relations and innovation program at IBM, which is also a party in the agreement.

Under the terms of the two main agreements, intellectual property from certain research collaborations will be made available free for commercial and academic use and the involved parties will establish rules on how such work can be used by the public.

Matthew Yi, Chronicle Staff Writer

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