Who are the joint owners of a Patent?
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Who are the joint owners of a Patent? Video Transcript
In this section, I am going to talk about who are the joint owners of a patent. The joint owners are all the listed parties under patent inventors that are listed on the patent; they are presumed to be joint owners unless there is an assignment to a common entity and each owns an undivided share of the patent based on the respective number of inventors that there are. An individual contribution by an inventor, one inventor might contribute a whole bunch and the other might not contribute much at all, but if they are both listed as inventors because maybe one of them contributed to one claim, someone contributed to 19 of the 20 claims, it does not matter. They are both 50-50 inventors and 50-50 owners of the patent. The first named inventor is the one that gets published on the cover of the patent. So if someone wants their name on the patent, then they should be the first named inventor so that their name gets printed. But absent that, the ownership is undivided based on each inventor that is listed. If they have assigned that invention to a common entity, like a corporation under an employment obligation, the company may actually own the patent.