#22 - Joint patent collaboration and infringement

A post on PatentlyO (full article can be seen here) brought some interesting facts to mind--as well as their repercussions. In the blog post, Dennis Crouch brings up some of the conditions for joint inventorship. This specifically states that joint inventorship is: "when an invention is made by two or more persons jointly," but it does not require that the two parties need to "physically work together or at the same time," "make the same type or amount of contribution" or contribute to "every claim of the patent."

I actually personally find this a bit difficult to understand, given that there is still the requirement that these be undertaken "jointly." Does it mean, then, that anyone who had even a minute role in contributing to the idea and claim, are "joint inventors?" That would certainly make sense, but I can imagine how this can be a gray area for both the inventors themselves, and then subsequently in court if it is brought into a case. In the case that the PatentlyO poster observed, the case was dismissed as joint infringement given that there was no evidence of collaboration.

This really brought to mind some of the issues that joint inventorship will bring up in the space of mobile. Given that Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Qualcomm, etc., often own patents together in different relationships, it really creates a series of problems particularly around litigation. For example, who is responsible for the fees? And who puts the patents on their balance sheets? Then who amortizes these patents and recognizes the amortization expense on the profit and loss statements?

An example of this is Apple and Google going in together to buy Kodak's patents. While it prevented Kodak from starting a bidding war between the two companies, it also created this grey area for patent ownership and possible tensions between the two owning companies in the future. Joint ownership certainly can be useful, but it presents the grey areas as well.