Are you an inventor?
Go Back 
Are you an inventor? Video Transcript
In this section, I am going to tell you what is inventorship. Inventorship is an objective test. If someone materially contributes at least one concept of a patent application claim, then they should be and they must be listed as inventors. What that means is inventorship cannot be played around with. You cannot just decide your professor or your boss should be an inventor, because the inventorship in the US patent application is very, very important. It needs to be only the people that materially contributed to the conception of the inventive concept. It should not also include people that maybe helped reduce the invention to practice. If I come up with this great idea and I figure out all the ways how this invention will work, you need to do that. You need to at least conceptualize how the invention will work, but I have not even prototyped but I thought all these details through and someone else goes and they prototype it and they made it work actually. They reduced that idea to practice based on what I told them. Those people are not the inventor. Only the person that materially contributed to the inventive concept is the inventor. Then again the people that were helping out reducing that invention to practice may have come up with something new as well. They might have come up with the problem that they had to overcome to make the invention actually work. In that case, they are also a co-inventor and they would need to be listed as an inventor. So, if anyone came up with the conception of the invention so that it could actually work and was feasible, then the inventors include the people that reduce it to practice. Normally, people that reduce it to practice by taking information that I have and just merely creating prototype are not to be listed as inventors. Only if they come across a problem and that problem was necessary to solve and they solved that problem to make your invention actually real and workable, because you cannot put inventorship in inventions and patents to protect things that actually work and which are useful. So, inventorship is anyone who materially contributes to at least one claim. It cannot be a company. It has to be a person. It has to be human beings that have actually contributed to that conception and not reduced it to practice. It should not be a boss like an author of a paper. Often people list their professor, their mentor, their boss. You cannot do that with the patent application. It is very important that you correctly list the inventorship because if you do not, your patent can get invalidated and challenged in court and lose all of the rights associated with it.