Patty Limerick sues CU Boulder for ownership of intellectual property

Patty Limerick, a tenured University of Colorado Boulder professor and former director of the university’s Center of the American West, is suing CU for ownership of her scholarly work and intellectual property.

CU leadership fired Limerick in October 2022 after she refused to step down following an internal investigation that revealed she used work time for personal matters and made her staff feel uncomfortable or pressured to perform additional work, including planning her wedding.

Limerick dedicated nearly three decades to the Center of the American West, which she and former CU law professor Charles Wilkinson founded together in 1986. Wilkinson died in June 2023.

During that time, Limerick created “extensive educational materials, scholarly and artistic works, and works of creative nonfiction that focused on the American West,” according to a complaint filed Thursday in Boulder County District Court.

Since Limerick was fired in 2022, she has been denied access to and control over her work created during her time at — and even before — the Center, the complaint states.

Under CU Boulder’s administrative policy on intellectual property, employees, “retain broad rights of ownership of scholarly and artistic works.”

“While current copyright law generally allocates ownership rights to the university as an employer, the University of Colorado assigns any ownership it has in educational materials to the person or people who create such materials,” the policy states. “Educational materials include, but are not limited to, textbooks, electronic media, syllabi, tests, assignments, monographs, papers, models, musical compositions, works of art and unpublished manuscripts.”

The only outlined exceptions to the policy are cases where the production of educational materials is part of a sponsored program, the materials are created under the specifically assigned duties of employees other than faculty, the materials were specifically commissioned by the university or substantial university resources were used in creating the materials.

It’s this final exception — use of substantial university resources — that CU leadership is claiming allows the university to retain ownership instead of Limerick, according to the complaint. University resources include such things as equipment, staff support, supplemental pay, and offloading from regular duties.