Potluck Inventions: When Everyone Brings a Dish, Who Owns the Dinner?

The new virtual nature of life has caused increased levels of collaboration among researchers. It’s often the case that tech transfer professionals learn of data, software or an insight that came from a third party. This can cause complicating factors like joint ownership, additional inventors, requirements to notify others or share data or even implicate options and licenses. In this session, partner Stephen Gardner as well as others will review the law of inventorship and recent case law differentiating mere prior art from inventive contributions among academic researchers. They will also discuss issues arising when new inventors or new owners are discovered, including foreign filing, inventor shares of revenue and ability to license the invention.