I recently had a question from one of our clients about who should be listed as an inventor on his patent application. If you have multiple founders, or a team of developers, researchers, or engineers, it is important to get this right.
Unlike authorship (which can have a certain flexibility), inventorship is determined based on a set of legal criteria. You need to ensure that the inventors are accurate (are actual “inventors”) based on these criteria. If you get them wrong it may be difficult or expensive to change them later, or, even worse, a competitor could use the mistake to try to invalidate your patent.
Always confirm with your lawyer if you are unsure, but simply put, in order to be an inventor, each person needs to have conceived of at least one of the claims of your patent. Once the claims of your patent have been written, you can go through one by one and ask “who initially came up with this idea?” This isn’t necessarily the person who built the element, or the person who tested it to confirm it worked (especially important in research settings).
Many of our clients are looking to get an initial sense of this before they have written their claims, so we consider it in the first module of The IP Link’s core program, Articulate Product.
In this module, we utilize a template worksheet called The Articulate Product Spreadsheet which has a section specifically devoted to this. In many cases, there is only one inventor and we don’t need to worry about this step, but when multiple people are involved it’s important to understand how inventorship is determined and get an initial sense of who should be listed on your patent as inventors.
Once you are clear on who the inventors are, it is also important to make sure that your business has signed agreements with all inventors ensuring that all rights to the invention are owned by the company.
If you need more help with this or would like to gain access to the Articulate Product Spreadsheet, just let me know!