Nov 4, 2009
Who is an inventor of a U.S. patent?
Inventorship is a legal question that can be complex and is therefore best determined by a patent attorney. Unlike authorship, not all members of a research team are necessarily inventors. Inventors must make a material contribution to the conception of the complete and operative invention as defined in the patent claims. As long as the conception is of a workable invention, the ultimate reduction to practice is irrelevant to an inventorship determination. If the reduction to practice requires extraordinary skill- or if no way of making or using a conceived invention is known- contributions to the reduction to practice may be inventive contributions.
A good faith determination of inventorship must be made by a patent attorney before an application is filed. Although inventorship can be corrected later, procedures for correcting inventorship are time consuming- and therefore costly. Inventorship must be determined for each claim of the patent application. For there to be joint or co-inventors of a claim, each inventor must have made some contribution to the claimed subject matter. However, the law does not require that each joint inventor work together or at the same time - or make the same type or amount of contribution. A patent may be held unenforceable if the inventorship determination is erroneous and is found to have been made with a "deceptive intent."
