Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Inventorship, Entitlement, and Ownership Issues in Europe and the United States

Patents protect inventions and provide competitive advantages. So who is the inventor and who is the owner of the patent? Well, it depends. In most countries, inventorship and ownership are separate legal questions and an individual may be an inventor but not an owner, or an owner but not an inventor.

Inventorship is often based on who conceives of an idea and who reduces the idea to a working embodiment. Ownership is often an entirely different question and often depends on underlying employment law and whether there is an employee agreement. An inventor could be entitled to an invention, but then choose to assign or transfer his rights in the invention to another.

• What happens when different people work on a project at different times and contribute different amounts and/or different aspects to the final invention?
• What if the invention was made at a company over several years, by different research teams, who never worked together but carried on the work of their predecessors?
• What if the invention was made at home without corporate resources—who is the inventor, who is the owner? What if the employee is an independent contractor or intern?

In this webinar, we will discuss practical considerations for determining who is an inventor and who may have ownership rights in the United States and Europe. We will also discuss:

• Ownership does not always equal inventorship
• Implications of incorrect inventorship
• Dealing with joint inventorship
• Transferring patent ownership and perfecting title

This webinar is the third in Finnegan’s 2015 “Strategic Patent Series for European Counsel.” We hope you are able to attend.

Moderator: 
Timothy P. McAnulty

Speaker: 
Michele C. Bosch 

Date:
Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Time:
15:00 - 16:00 BST
16:00 - 17:00 CEST
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m. EDT