Certificate of Inventorship Needs An Upgrade

 

In one of my previous blogs https://www.jpranavc.in/2022/12/the-inventors-who-arent-inventors.html , I opined that why every inventor’s actual contribution in the invention must be included; precisely bifurcated, segregated; in the declaration of the inventorship itself, so much so that, once the application becomes public (pre-grant or post-grant), one would be able to know who contributed what in the invention.

The reason behind this was/is you must’ve seen most of the venture capitalists, investors, founders etc. add their names in the inventions; sometimes claiming the entire invention by solely being the original inventor in the declaration (in many cases they aren’t); which according to me was/is not only an unethical practice, but also, condemnable.

I’m not referring to the employer-employee contracts, assignments; as of course, the applicant i.e. the company/assignee itself, finally owns the invention, whereas the names of the inventors are already mentioned in most of the cases. But there’re instances, wherein the name(s) of the founder(s), investor(s) etc. been unnecessarily or wrongfully been added, either alongside with the other names of the inventors, or, as the sole inventor in the application, just because they funded something. This should be negated!

Thus, this practice should be discouraged. And once this process of adding the individual contributions made (as well as in the claims itself) in the declaration of the inventorship commences; then when the certificate of inventorship is issued, exact part of the contribution made in precise wordings, in the invention + claims, should also be mentioned in the certificate, so that, one can determine who made what percentage of contributions in the invention/application/granted patent. 😊

© Pranav Chaturvedi