Hackathons and intellectual property, who owns hackathon projects?

Seen as more of a social event, developers attend hackathons in order to network with fellow programmers, engineers and others. Yet many participants and companies may not realize the repercussions of the intellectual property created during these marathon coding events, as recently discussed by Harvard Business Review.

Some hackathons are held internally, where only company employees can participate. But when the gatherings are more collaborative, the ownership of the innovation and intellectual property is unclear, which can lead to problems about unequal contributions and rights to the patent.

For this reason, some companies ban their employees from participating in external hackathons, despite the fact it seems overbearing and could be bad for talent recruiting.

Instead