Patently Rediculous

[Prudence]

Originally Posted by Snowflake

In US patent practice applications are filed in the name of the inventors, and then are (typically) assigned to a company. Most inventors work for a company and part of their contract is to assign the rights to the objects they're paid to invent back to the company. As an employee of WED, Bob Gurr would assign the rights to the invention to the company.

Yup - the inventor has to be a person (or people, for joint ownership) who make an oath of some sort as part of the application. A company doesn't invent. A person can be hired by a company to invent and can own the IP associated with the invention, but the actual inventing was done by people.

I don't really know much about design patents - we never seem to cover that topic. But patents have to be related to something useful, and copyrights don't.