Inventor (patent)

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 slightly vary from one European country to another. Inventorship is generally not considered to be a patentability criterion under European patent law.

Under older U.S. case law, an inventor is the one with "intellectual domination"^[1] over the inventive process and not merely one who assists in its reduction to practice. In the contemporary U.S. patent law inventor is defined as the person, who "conceived a claim". The persons who only made prototypes or suggested improvements not claimed in a patent are not inventors.

As the patent application moves through an examination at the USPTO, the original application is usually split into two or more divisional patent applications, which may have different inventors, because of different claims in the applications, and therefore different people, who conceived the claims. Therefore, it is important to write down during the filing of the very first application for each claim, who conceived it.

"Joint inventors", or "co-inventors", exist when a patentable invention is the result of inventive work of more than one inventor. Joint inventors may exist even where one inventor contributed a majority of the work.