Is it legitimate to have a CEO add their name to a patent? My impression is that the "inventor(s)" have to be the people who actually came up with the idea.
According to the book, this was one thing that particularly bothered the lead scientist, Ian Gibbons, who was subpoenaed to testify in a patent case:
> IN APRIL, Theranos informed Ian that he had been subpoenaed to testify in the Fuisz case. The prospect of being deposed made him nervous. He and Rochelle discussed the lawsuit several times. Rochelle had once done work as a patent attorney, so Ian asked her to review Theranos’s patent portfolio in the hope that she could give him some advice. While doing so, she noticed that Elizabeth’s name was on all the company’s patents, often in first place in the list of inventors. When Ian told her that Elizabeth’s scientific contribution had been negligible, Rochelle warned him that the patents could be invalidated if this was ever exposed. That only served to make him more agitated.
Gibbons was the Theranos chief scientist who committed suicide in 2013:
I've seen this happen before. Especially with startups, I think it's a mixture of:
- CEO ego.
- Although patents by employees are assigned to the company and unequivocally owned by the company, many early stage (and especially paranoid) CEOs worry about the optics of having many named inventors leaving the company. If you're Google, IBM, etc with 100K employees filing 10K patents per year no one cares if X number of those employees in listed filings leave the company. If you're a relatively small, early stage company with a few hundred patents losing just a few key employees named on filings raises red flags for investors, journalists, etc as they could represent a substantial portion of your "inventors"/IP/brain trust, etc and thus, your valuation. Of course this kind of action is very transparent but with her own "reality distortion field" I wouldn't be surprised if anyone who reviewed these thought she was actually responsible for some portion of the invention.
- Some companies have a very broad policy for who to include as a named inventor. She could have been part of a single conversation/meeting/etc and required listing.
- CEO ego. Not a typo, I listed this twice because in this as in many of these cases, ego is likely 90% of the reason she's listed on these. Frankly this kind of behavior is insulting to the other named inventors that actually did the work, but what recourse do they have? Is battling the CEO to get her name off a filing worth leaving your job for?
> My impression is that the "inventor(s)" have to be the people who actually came up with the idea.
(Inactive) patent attorney here. Your impression is correct (for the U.S.; I can't speak to other places): ALL "co-inventors" MUST be listed as inventors, and ONLY they may be listed. A "co-inventor" is someone who contributes to the "conception," i.e., the complete mental picture, of the subject matter of at least one claim in the patent application. [0]
Good to know. I've known a CEO who deliberately altered all the patents from his startup to put his name (and only his name) as inventor, rather than, say, people who actually any clue what the patent was about.
That's right. I'm not a patent lawyer, but one has told me that to be listed as an inventor, you have to be an inventor. Now, if the patent has multiple claims, you only have to be responsible for one of them.
> IN APRIL, Theranos informed Ian that he had been subpoenaed to testify in the Fuisz case. The prospect of being deposed made him nervous. He and Rochelle discussed the lawsuit several times. Rochelle had once done work as a patent attorney, so Ian asked her to review Theranos’s patent portfolio in the hope that she could give him some advice. While doing so, she noticed that Elizabeth’s name was on all the company’s patents, often in first place in the list of inventors. When Ian told her that Elizabeth’s scientific contribution had been negligible, Rochelle warned him that the patents could be invalidated if this was ever exposed. That only served to make him more agitated.
Gibbons was the Theranos chief scientist who committed suicide in 2013:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3776888/Award-winnin...