IP governance
Intellectual-property governance note
A partner's first practical question about a materials company is usually not what it can do but who would own what afterwards. This note sets out the principles UAX applies. It describes a governance framework, not a portfolio: no patent, application, filing count or filing date is claimed anywhere on this site.
This reference page is published in English, which is the governing version. It records corporate, evidentiary and regulatory statements whose precision matters more than their reach, so it is not machine-translated. Native Turkish and Japanese versions are in preparation with counsel; where a translation is later published, the English text prevails in the event of any discrepancy.
What is not claimed
UAX publishes no patent count, no application count, no grant, no priority date and no family. Where a filing exists, it is evidenced to a verified counterparty from the filing receipt itself, not asserted on a website. A reader should assume nothing about the registered position from this page.
Background and foreground IP
Background IP is what each party brings into a collaboration and already owns. It stays with the party that brought it. A collaboration does not licence background IP by implication; any licence is express, written and scoped.
Foreground IP is what the collaboration creates. UAX's default starting position — not a fixed rule — is that foreground IP arising from jointly funded, jointly staffed work is jointly owned, with each party free to exploit it in its own field of use and neither party able to licence it onward unilaterally. Ownership is ultimately set by the agreement between the parties: sole ownership by one party, assignment with a licence-back, or other splits are all available where the parties agree them, and are a matter for contract and counsel rather than a position UAX asserts in the abstract.
Any joint-ownership clause must also allocate patent prosecution and maintenance cost, enforcement control and proceeds, sublicensing, improvements, confidentiality, decision deadlock and abandonment. No public page pre-decides those terms.
Ownership is not the same as freedom to operate. Jointly owning a patent to foreground IP does not establish that practising it is clear of third-party rights, so any joint-development agreement is expected to allocate freedom-to-operate and third-party clearance responsibility, and to decide in advance who controls, and who funds, the defence of a third-party infringement claim brought against the jointly-owned work, and how the cost of that defence and any recovery are shared. UAX treats freedom-to-operate as a distinct question from ownership rather than an implication of it.
Where foreground IP would fall within Türkiye's national control lists, the transfer and authorisation regime that applies to it continues to apply regardless of the ownership agreed between the parties. An ownership clause cannot disapply an export-control regime, and UAX does not draft as though it could.
Inventorship and chain of title
Inventorship is a question of fact about who contributed to the conception, and UAX records it contemporaneously rather than reconstructing it at filing time. Laboratory records identify contributors by name and date.
Chain of title is documented in writing for every contributor — employees, students, academic collaborators and contractors alike — before work begins. Where work takes place within a technology development zone or alongside a university, the assignment position of each participant is settled in advance rather than assumed from their affiliation.
UAX operates inside the İTÜ ARI Teknokent ecosystem as a tenant. That is a location. It is not a shareholding, a spin-off status, a licence from the university, or any claim on university-owned intellectual property.
Filing governance
Two decisions precede any filing. First, whether filing is compatible with the export-control classification of the subject matter. Filing and publication are distinct events: a patent application is not published at the moment it is filed but is normally laid open to the public about eighteen months later (see the WIPO PCT and EPO guidance in the regulatory-sources annex). It is that later publication that discloses the technical content — and publishing controlled technical data is not made lawful by the fact that a patent office received the filing, so the classification question is settled before filing rather than after. Second, whether the commercial value is better protected by filing or by keeping the subject matter unpublished.
Where a subject matter is dual-use, those two questions are answered before drafting starts, with counsel, and the answer is recorded. Filing decisions are not delegated to whoever happens to be drafting.
Where a first filing would be made outside the jurisdiction in which the invention was made, the first-filing jurisdiction and any applicable foreign-filing licence or national-security secrecy review for dual-use subject matter are settled before filing abroad, not afterward. Publication is also distinct from grant: a granted patent is a further, separate event from the ~18-month publication, and neither publication nor grant is evidence of freedom to operate or of any export authorisation.
Field-of-use licensing
UAX's licensing model is by field of use rather than by territory alone. A civil or commercial field — launch and re-entry hardware, process heat, concentrated-solar receivers, turbine hot sections, industrial durability — can be licensed on ordinary commercial terms. A defence-adjacent field cannot be licensed on the same terms, because the transfer and authorisation regime that applies to it sits outside the parties' agreement.
A field-of-use licence therefore states the permitted field positively, states the excluded fields explicitly, and carries an end-use and end-user undertaking. Whether any particular licence is available in a particular case is subject to applicable law, authority decisions and transaction-specific counsel review.
Ring-fencing, and what it does not do
UAX is structured to support a ring-fenced civil entity, so that an investor or partner can take a position in commercial work without exposure to defence-adjacent lines. Ring-fencing separates ownership, governance and information flow.
It does not create an exemption. If a formulation falls within a control list, moving it into a civil entity does not remove it from the list, and UAX does not present ring-fencing as a route around export control. Anyone who is offered that argument by anyone should treat it as a warning sign.
Status of this note
This is a statement of UAX's own governance policy — a UAX process (sanitised) statement in the terms of the evidence basis. It is not legal advice, it is not a term sheet, and it does not bind either party in advance of a written agreement. External counsel review of the IP and export-control interaction is not complete; no claim is made here that counsel has been retained or instructed. Its status is recorded on the status matrix.
Evidence basis · Public bibliography · Investor or corporate VC