[ajb]

How patents happen:

An alarm goes out: our company has fewer patents than company X! In fact, we have the smallest patent hoard of our competitor group. If they sue us we might not have enough patents to sue them back! We must have more patents! Everyone who gets a patent gets a bonus! ( Exit CEO, trailing exclamation marks. All the engineers file their pet idea as a patent, hoping management will be interested in building it).

(Some years later) Okay, some of those patents we filed are a bit silly. But at least we now have a huge, intimidating patent pile! No one will dare sue us now! Mua ha ha! But let's be a bit more careful what we give those patent bonuses for. (Meanwhile at company X: our company has fewer patents than company Y!...)

The above is a true story, happened to me. Well, apart from the moustache twirling. My name is on some not very practical patents. So I'm not very convinced by stories which read the tea leaves from patents as to what a company intends ( Or economists trying to infer innovation rate from patent filing rate). Another problem is that the patent office is slow. Unless the company is General Fusion, most probably the product will be out before the patent.

[skybrian]

I almost got my name on a patent that way for sharing an idea in an internal forum. I refused (well, I asked politely) and they took my name off it. (There was someone else in the conversation as well.)

[pnw_hazor]

Omitting an inventor from a patent is usually grounds for invalidating the patent.

(Unless they are careful to exclude all of your contributions from the claims -- which is almost impossible)

[gaudat]

Sounds like it's a bad idea to have our names on a patent from the way you said it. Can you enlighten us on that?

[skybrian]

I don't like the idea of software patents, generally, and would feel weird arguing against them if I had my name on one.

[ericlewis]

Anecdata: but, just because I threw in a couple of suggestions I didn’t feel like I deserved it. Also, don’t much care for patents personally.

[debug-desperado]

Similar story with a patent that a friend applied for at National Instruments some years ago for his work on LabView software. As far as I could tell from his description it was more of an implementation detail rather than a patentable product. NI was pushing for patents though, and he obliged. Ended up getting a nice little bonus for his young family!