These articles introduce the types of agreements you need to protect your invention from others when you tell others about your invention. For example, when you are launching your inventive product, you may need to share your idea with investors, potential licensees, independent contractors and employees. You need to mitigate complications (e.g., inadvertent that might arise as you engage others. The types of agreements that will help to protect your idea include:

Confidentiality Agreements
Independent contractor's agreements
Invention Assignment agreements
Joint exploitation agreements

Losing invention rights when hiring or collaborating with others

When you hire either as an independent contractor or an employee to design or engineer your product, you can end up not having any invention rights. When you share your invention with your friends and family, you risk reducing the value of your invention rights. The core issue is ownership. Who owns the invention or patent […]

Patent Assignments for Independent Contractors

Patent rights initially vest with the person that conceives of the invention. For example, if a company hires an independent contractors, patent rights initially vest with the independent contractor. If the company hiring the independent contractor wants to exploit the invention, the company must acquire the patent rights from the independent contractor through an assignment. […]

Avoid Problems: Get an Invention Assignment Agreement

Companies owns invention rights by one of three ways from employees. A formal Invention Assignment Agreement is typically executed when the employee begins employment. The Agreement assigns certain inventions of the employee to the company. Invention rights can also be acquired by way of the Employed-to-Invent doctrine. In particular, to the extent that the employer […]