FAR 52.227-11: Patent Rights for Contractors

FAR 52.227-11 (Patent Rights — Ownership by the Contractor)

FAR 52.227-11, “Patent Rights—Ownership by the Contractor,” is the patent-rights clause the Federal Acquisition Regulation requires contracting officers to insert into federal procurement <a href='/dictionary/term/federal-contract'>contracts</a> awarded to small business firms and nonprofit organizations (including universities) for experimental, developmental, or research work. It is prescribed by FAR 27.303(b)(1) and is the FAR's own codification of the Bayh-Dole Act's contractor-ownership default — the contract-instrument counterpart to the 37 CFR 401.14 Standard Patent Rights Clause used in grants and cooperative agreements. A federally funded project is governed by 52.227-11, rather than 37 CFR 401.14, specifically because of which funding instrument was used (a procurement contract) rather than because the underlying substantive rights differ.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 3 Aug 2026

Ask about FAR 52.227-11 (Patent Rights — Ownership by the Contractor)

Answers are drawn from this dictionary entry and the rest of the CASRAI corpus, with a link to every source.

Answers are AI-generated from CASRAI’s own published pages and can be wrong, so check the linked sources before relying on one; your question is logged without personal data — never sold, never used to train a third-party model — to show us what CASRAI is missing, so please do not type personal or confidential details. How we use this

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A university receives a federal agency procurement contract (not a grant) for applied research work; because the university is a nonprofit organization, the contracting officer inserts FAR 52.227-11, and the university's inventions made under that contract follow 52.227-11's disclosure/election timeline rather than 37 CFR 401.14's.
Is an instance
An SBIR Phase III award structured as a federal contract with a small business awardee incorporates 52.227-11, giving the small business the same contractor-ownership default Bayh-Dole provides for grants.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A university receiving an NIH or NSF research grant is governed by the Bayh-Dole standard patent rights clause at 37 CFR 401.14, not by FAR 52.227-11, because a grant is not a procurement contract and FAR Part 27 does not apply to it.
Not an instance
A large, for-profit (other-than-small-business) contractor performing the same kind of research work under a federal contract is not covered by 52.227-11; the contracting officer instead prescribes FAR 52.227-13, under which the government retains title to inventions rather than the contractor.

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="FAR 52.227-11 (Patent Rights — Ownership by the Contractor)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/far-52-227-11" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/far-52-227-11",
  "name": "FAR 52.227-11 (Patent Rights — Ownership by the Contractor)",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/far-52-227-11",
  "description": "FAR 52.227-11, “Patent Rights—Ownership by the Contractor,” is the patent-rights clause the Federal Acquisition Regulation requires contracting officers to insert into federal procurement <a href='/dictionary/term/federal-contract'>contracts</a> awarded to small business firms and nonprofit organizations (including universities) for experimental, developmental, or research work. It is prescribed by FAR 27.303(b)(1) and is the FAR's own codification of the Bayh-Dole Act's contractor-ownership default — the contract-instrument counterpart to the 37 CFR 401.14 Standard Patent Rights Clause used in grants and cooperative agreements. A federally funded project is governed by 52.227-11, rather than 37 CFR 401.14, specifically because of which funding instrument was used (a procurement contract) rather than because the underlying substantive rights differ.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/compliance-regulatory#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/far-52-227-11",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-08-03T23:02:02",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}