Send Assignee Age with airSlate SignNow

Send assignee age

hi Stuart Walsh here with the inventors Learning Center please subscribe for more videos and check out our website WWE inventors LC comm today we're going to look at patent ownership and how patents can change ownership through the process of assignments first off an invention always starts out as the property of the inventor but once it becomes a patent or even a patent application its ownership can be transferred patents are intellectual property and like other forms of property they can change ownership a lot these transfers of ownership happen for lots of different reasons I'll run through a few common examples employee to employer generally if you invent something as part of your job and your employer pays for the patent you will be required to sign over the patent to your employer you will be listed as the inventor but you won't own the patent on the corporate front companies can transfer ownership of patents or portfolios of patents in the course of doing business like when they go through mergers and acquisitions independent inventors often sell patents to outside companies one that's very important to consider for independent inventors is transferring ownership of your own patents to a holding company set up strictly for the purposes of owning intellectual property this has the advantage of isolating the intellectual property from the rest of the business co-inventor to co-inventor I was thinking in particular of instances where an inventor hires a contractor such as an engineer or draftsman to work on developing an invention and then in the course of doing this work the contractor might provide some inventive input this makes the contractor a co-inventor but the contractor is also basically an employee so he or she might need to sign over their ownership to any intellectual property to the original inventor the one who is paying the bills so there are lots of reasons why patents can change hands let's look at the process of how it's done patents transfer ownership through the process of assignment this is a two-step process the first step is a legal agreement transferring ownership from the current owner to the new owner this works pretty much like any there's sort of transfer of property agreement the next step is to take that agreement and file it with the USPTO office of assignments once the transfer is recorded at the Patent Office anyone who wants to know who currently owns the patent can look it up let's look at some examples of assignments using the USPTO assignment search tool the first example I have is an employee to employer transfer this is an instance where several researchers working at a university in this case the University of Texas at Austin developed something and the university patented it so the original owners of the invention would be the inventors but they would then assign ownership to the University now this particular patent then transferred ownership again from Texas to a company called intellectual Ventures a very famous patent holding company some might even call it a patent troll another thing we see a lot are big corporations through mergers and acquisitions or other types of sell offs transferring ownership of IP portfolios then all of the patents in the portfolio have to have a new assignment recorded even if it was just one big transfer of ownership agreement the assignment will have to be recorded separately for each piece of intellectual property a few years ago Motorola was acquired by Google and in that process all of their patents changed ownership and here's another little interesting thing you see here that the name is not just Google it's Google technology Holdings this is most likely a holding company that Google has set up solely for the purposes of owning intellectual property they probably have dozens of different holding companies all with names pretty similar to this I have one final example this is from Kevin Prince here at the inventors Learning Center and his father who invented a wireless telephone coupler as co-inventors what they decided to do was transfer the patent application to a holding company again this was a holding company that they controlled we always recommend that independent inventors explore the option of taking their patents and signing it over to an LLC that they control preferably one that has no outside dealings that way the intellectual property portfolio is fully isolated from any business or personal dealings so those are a few examples of assignments and I do recommend that you go and have a look at the USPTO assignment database to get a better idea of how patents can change ownership again if you like this video please give us a thumbs up please subscribe and check out our website for more information about patents and other topics important for inventors thanks for watching