What does Patent Ownership mean?
Go Back 
What does Patent Ownership mean? Video Transcript
Here I am going to explain what patent ownership means. Patent ownership is the entity or person that owns the patent. At the time of filing, the ownership is the inventors themselves who materially contributed to this one claim. They own an undivided share of the patent. They might assign those rights to a company that they work for because they might have an employment agreement which compels them to assign an invention after it is made to the company. You cannot assign something until an invention is made. So when the invention is made and reduced to practice or documented in a patent application, you have to assign that to the company based on a previous employment agreement a person might have. Absent that, each inventor is an undivided owner of the patent. There may be some patents that, if the company or corporation has an employment agreement with an employee, may allow for filing separately in the employee's name. Usually if it is not within the scope of the employment of that particular employee, most companies will allow it if it is first cleared with them, or even if it is not, clearly all the working prototypes and other assets of the person privately were used rather than the company's assets, they really do not have any rights to it. But it is a grey area sometimes and it is very important that it is within the scope of the person's employment. Otherwise, the inventor has to assign the invention to the company. There is also a shop right doctrine in the US where if some assets of the company were used to develop something that is outside that person's scope of employment, then that shop right doctrine might give a license to the company to that particular issuing technology or patent that might result. These are the main issues for employees in universities or students in universities. If there are federal funds or university funds used, oftentimes there is an obligation to assign it to the university first since the invention was made underneath that university's contractual relationship with the student or the employee.