[patio11]

Entitled is a funny word with two senses here. One is "Do I have a claim for compensation which the legal system will back?" and another is "Do I deserve do get paid this money?"

Legal questions are often best answered by a lawyer. The lawyer is going to ask to see the contract you have with your employer about this compensation. I do not have access to this contract, but I have a probabalistic guess for you based on standard practices in the tech industry: you do not, in fact, have a contractual right to payment for the company's patents. They're the company's patents, not your patents -- you signed an IP assignment agreement which made this absolutely, unambiguously clear roughly contemporaneously with starting your job. Your sole guaranteed compensation for any work was your salary. Your company owes you zero dollars and zero cents of remaining salary; they mathed the heck out of that when you stopped working for them and, after that check was cut, you were even. Your company has discretion in awarding your bonuses when you worked there; they're going to exercise their discretion in not awarding you bonuses since you do not work there.

Do you deserve to get paid the money? That's a rather different kettle of fish. To the extent that you're well-educated adult who can understand contracts presented to you in English, none of the above should come as a surprise. To the extent that one thinks that the purpose of the bonus is not incenting future behavior but rather rewarding past behavior, a reasonable argument could be made that since you put in the work you should receive the fruits of it.

[wsr]

Thanks for the long reply patio11.

I can see where you are coming from, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same argument is used by the company. If that is the case. O well, I wish them well but I would never be this naive again.

There is just one point that you might have missed.

The patent work doesn't stop the moment you finish filing. In fact, almost all valuable patents will be challenged in court, which can cost a LOT of money. In those cases, the company would have to hire back the original inventors to defend them in court, for which the original inventors can charge almost an arbitrary amount of money for.

In my personal opinion, it would not be wise for the company to argue over pocket change amount of money if it risks destroying the relationship between the company and the inventor. If that is really the case, when the day comes that the company needs help, the inventor would not hesitate to charge exorbitant fee just to spite the company. I honestly believe this is why @smoyer in the other comment is still getting paid by his company even though he is no longer employed.

Last but not least, on a human level, I feel it is a bit unfair given how much extra I worked for these patents, above and beyond my call of duty. I'm not going to cry over it but it will leave me in a pretty bad mood. If I end up getting screwed over, well... let my experience serve as a lesson for rest of the aspiring inventors in similar situation in the future.

[lucozade]

> the company would have to hire back the original inventors to defend them in court

What makes you say that? I'm genuinely curious. I'm the named inventor on a few of patents for a previous employer that were all granted after I left. It never occurred to me that they would continue to need my services (nor have they).

BTW have you asked your previous employer about the situation? My guess is that @smoyer's situation is fairly rare and the company will likely consider it a perk rather than an entitlement. It's not clear there would be any harm in asking though.

[wsr]

I have friends who have gone through this experience. I was pretty surprised too that the company was willing to pay so much to defend their patents. Granted... my friend's rate was fairly reasonable... I think between $500-$1000/hour in probably the early 2000s.

It really depends on the patent in the end of the day. If a company can potentially lose tens or hundreds of millions over a lost lawsuit, spending a million on legal defense would be very reasonable.

I have not talked to my employer about this. I wanted to get some collective wisdom from the HN community before approaching them. But yeah, I'll definitely give it a shot. It doesn't hurt to ask.