Who Owns a Patent? The Creator of the Idea or the Creator of the Product
October 11, 2004
A recent ruling in Stanelco Fibre Optics Ltd v Bioprogress Technology Ltd has helped clarify who the owner of a patent is when one person has an idea for a product and someone else creates a prototype of the product based on that idea. Imagine that your technical director comes up with a brilliant idea for a ground breaking device. Your company doesn’t have the facilities to develop a prototype itself, and enters into an agreement with another company to produce one. Which company is entitled to the patent?
The first question to ask is: "Who is the inventor?" The Patents Act 1977 states that the inventor is the actual deviser of the invention, i.e. the creator of the idea. The courts in this recent ruling confirmed that there is no requirement that the idea is actually ‘reduced to practice’ by the creator of the idea. In this example, therefore the Technical Director would be the inventor by virtue of his original idea. Your company would (provided that the Technical Director is also an employee of the company) be the owner of the patent for the device. This would be so even if, as in our example, the idea of the device was communicated to the other company as nothing more than an idea.
However if the other company creates an additional inventive concept and refines the idea, then the other company's employee will become a joint inventor and the other company a co-owner of the patent. The other company may even adapt the original idea to a sufficient extent that it creates a totally different inventive concept and becomes solely entitled to the patent
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