Legal advice: company wants me to build 10 of the systems i developed during my internship
EDIT: Thank you all for your replies. We have checked the contracts with the company, it says nothing about IP, so it does not belong to them. In the terms and conditions from our school, we found that any project, system or research made by a student during their internship is IP of the student. We will be negotiating with the company for further development and peoduction.
ORIGINAL: To finish my studies, I completed an unpaid internship at an aircraft maintenance company. At this company, aircraft are regularly damaged because employees accidentally collide with parked aircraft using high lifts. The resulting damage often amounts to thousands of euros.
During the internship, we were required by our school to complete a research assignment, which is essentially a smaller bachelor’s thesis because the internship was international. The school is in Belgium, while the internship took place in the Netherlands.
Together with two fellow students, I decided to investigate these accidents and try to find a way to reduce both the number of incidents and the resulting damage. We wrote a paper and, alongside it, developed a warning system that can be installed on the high lifts.
The development costs, currently around €120, were paid by us. However, the company repeatedly stated that they would reimburse all costs once we submitted the receipts.
After presenting our system to the company, they were very enthusiastic and asked whether we would be willing and able to build ten additional systems for them, fully funded by the company. In addition, they asked us to create a step-by-step guide so they could replicate the system themselves.
To us, building ten additional systems falls outside the scope of the internship, and we are not particularly interested in doing so because it offers little educational value and the internship itself is unpaid. We would, however, like to offer the company these ten systems. That would either mean giving them everything we worked hard on so they can reproduce it themselves, or building the systems ourselves.
Should we ask the company to hire us and pay us to build the systems? Would it be better to build the systems ourselves and sell them to the company with a profit margin? Should we provide them with a construction manual so they can build the systems themselves, but only after signing a contract that prevents them from sharing or selling the design to other companies? Do we need to patent the system, or would something like an I-Depot registration be sufficient?
We are also unsure who owns the intellectual property rights to this system. Does it belong to our school because it was developed as part of an academic assignment? Does it belong to us because we designed and developed the system? Or does it belong to the company because they provided the internship opportunity and the environment in which we developed it?
Our system is not the first of its kind, but it is significantly cheaper than comparable systems currently on the market and apparently desirable for this company and possibly others as well.
We are just three engineering students with little knowledge of intellectual property, patents, startups, or business matters in general.
Any advice regarding the best course of action would be greatly appreciated.