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In patent law, an inventor is the person, or persons in United States patent law, who contribute to the claims of a patentable invention. In some patent law frameworks, however, such as in the European Patent Convention (EPC) and its case law, no explicit, accurate definition of who exactly is an inventor is provided. The definition may ...
The ability to assign ownership rights increases the liquidity of a patent as property. Inventors can obtain patents and then sell them to third parties. [71] The third parties then own the patents and have the same rights to prevent others from exploiting the claimed inventions, as if they had originally made the inventions themselves.
Under United States law, a patent is a right granted to the inventor of a (1) process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, (2) that is new, useful, and non-obvious. A patent is the right to exclude others, for a limited time (usually, 20 years) from profiting from a patented technology without the consent of the patent ...
A patent can be described as all of the following: Property – one or more components (rather than attributes), whether physical or incorporeal, of a person's estate; or so belonging to, as in being owned by, a person or jointly a group of people or a legal entity like a corporation or even a society.
The publication of the invention is mandatory to get a patent. Keeping the same invention as a trade secret rather than disclosing it in a patent publication, for some inventions, could prove valuable well beyond the limited time of any patent term but at the risk of unpermitted disclosure or congenial invention by a third party.
The patent in question claimed a combination of several bacterial strains, which help bean plants with nitrogen fixation. These different bacteria surprisingly did not inhibit each other, thus displaying a form of symbiosis instead. The problem with this "invention" was that it was not "made by man", but rather discovered in Nature.
The 100 known most prolific inventors based on worldwide utility patents are shown in the following table. While in many cases this is the number of utility patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, it may include utility patents granted by other countries, as noted by the source references for an inventor.
Another meaning of invention is cultural invention, which is an innovative set of useful social behaviours adopted by people and passed on to others. [5] The Institute for Social Inventions collected many such ideas in magazines and books. [6] Invention is also an important component of artistic and design creativity. Inventions often extend ...