Dear Khandro,
I have already expressed my regrets regarding your daughter-in-laws apparent rip-off.
But I'll explain how professional research works as regards "intellectual property" in honest environments. (Note it's not exclusive to science).
(a) To carry out serious research you need funding from a grant-giving body or commercial company.
Without such funding for salary, research equipment and materials, assistant(s), the costs of attending conferences etc. plus the privelege of working alongside fellow researchers (not necessarily in your field) you have no job!
(b) It follows from the above that you cannot claim ownership of your results.
(c) This is best exemplified by the patenting process which requires unique invention, a major improvement on an existing invention (e.g. Dyson's bagless vacuum cleaner) or practicable discovery like penicilllin although Fleming ruined the British patenting chance by the real workers: Ernst Chain and Lord Florey by "giving it to the world" i.e. the USA.
(d) Given the above, certainly in industry, the ownership of the intellectual property is not that of the individual employee research worker but of the company or other funder.
(e) Whenever I, using the company's patent officer, filed a patent application, I had to assign the patent-rights to my company. In return I was sent a pound coin sellotaped to a letter acknowledging my assignment of the intellectual property. Quite right and the pound coin over-payment but sealed the deal legally.
(f) Friends and family have said "What! A mere quid for making a patentable finding, not fair". Of course they are wrong - without my company's funding I could not have achieved it and anyway that was my job (as well as making open publications where the address below my team's names was that of the company).
In summary, being a research worker is not fundamentally different from being a bus-driver or a road-sweeper. It's just more fun - some of the time!
Kind Regards,
SIQ.