Petr Taborsky
American chemist
Petr Táborský was the first person in the United States to be prosecuted in criminal court for stealing intellectual property. The property in question was research by a team Taborsky was part of while he was a student at the University of South Florida. Taborsky was eventually found guilty.
Discovery
In 1988, Taborsky was a chemistry student working at the University of South Florida as an assistant researcher on an unsuccessful project sponsored by Florida Progress Corporation. At the end of the designated research period, he claimed to have obtained permission from a dean in the College of Engineering to conduct his own experiments using a different approach, hoping to use the material for a master's thesis. His independent research at the university's lab led to an important discovery that could be applied to filter ammonia from polluted water.
Both the university and the Florida Progress Corporation claimed the invention as theirs because it was made using their laboratory. They also claimed that Taborsky was not entitled to any compensation for having made the discovery. Taborsky disagreed and responded by taking the research notes from the laboratory. He used these notes to apply for patent, which was awarded to him.
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This entry incorporates text from “Petr Taborsky” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.