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| Authored by: Ian Al on Tuesday, September 11 2012 @ 11:33 AM EDT |
The inventor could always remain the legal title owner under the law and would
only be permitted to assign beneficial rights of use, licensing and enforcement
to, say, the employer.
If the employer wanted to sell those rights onward, the permission for the
further transfer would have to be given by the inventor. If the inventor had
moved on and his new employer was unwilling for his time to be taken up in this
way, well, tough luck.
In any civil dispute, the inventor would have to explain how the text of the
patent referred to his actual invention. If he/she was unable to do that, then
the patent would be deemed unenforceable by the court.
The inventor would be the only expert witness in court that could assert that
the defendant's invention was a copy of the inventor's patented invention and in
what way it was a copy. The inventor would be the only person permitted to
assist the court during claims construction. He/she could still be coached by
the patent lawyers to claim the right things and use good definitions of terms
so as not to damage the case in court.
The result of this would be that the patent lawyers and lawyers litigating
patent cases would have to be extremely careful not to push the patent wording
too far from the inventor's understanding of his invention. In addition, the
inventor's employer would have to weigh the loss of the employee's work against
the benefit of the litigation and would have to pay the expenses and additional
hours for the employee.
It would be almost impossible for patents used as Troll food to be raised in a
court case because of the difficulty of getting the original inventor involved
in the case when the inventor's employer has seen all the value they were going
to get out of the patent.
Imagine what would happen to patent portfolios. They could no longer be sold on
as a single package. Each patent would have to be separately negotiated with the
respective inventor.
I can see business saying that this would be an impossible imposition on them
which would practically destroy the existing patent system at a stroke. Well,
it would certainly destroy a lot of patent system misuse, at a stroke!
---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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