I worked for a Colorado gardening company for a few years. I spent some of my free time during that period developing a very effective product for repelling Japanese scarab beetles, and tested it on a client's property; something that both my former boss and the property owner approved of me doing. None of the development outside of observation was conducted on company time.
I put a lot of effort into making it work despite my complete layman's idea of chemistry. It worked. It even made grasshoppers flee, and had no noticable effects on the test plants. The only complaint I ever heard was that it smelled bad; that's kinda the point. I was ecstatic and gave a written recipe to my former boss. I have pretty solid reason to believe that they lost that scrap of paper. What they have now is nothing close to what I made, by smell alone.
I signed a patent application earlier this year (late March, early April) and resigned from that job since then. I'm pretty sure I have no legal right to any of it because of my state's laws. Especially if it is approved and I'm conveniently left off of the paperwork. It would be a dumb idea to hire a lawyer to try to get that back now from everything I can see. My former boss claimed that they “had the idea for years” but I've yet to see any evidence outside of that claim. No notes, no advice during my testing, nothing.
I just don't know how to reconcile it internally. A large part of me wants to just apply for a patent with the functional formula, stank be damned. Another part wants to just release the formula to other gardeners and make it a sort of freeware. I just hate seeing a shitty person laugh their way to the bank with something I created.
Fuck.