An overview of documents inventors traditionally sign.
By Eyal H. Barash, J.D.
You just started a new job at PharmaCo in the medicinal chemistry division. For your first project, you are synthesizing a brand new class of compounds directed to a particular target. You and the project leader have put together a novel scaffold and made dozens of compounds using that scaffold, and your colleagues have been doing in vitro and in vivo testing to measure the activity of the resulting compounds. At a team meeting, the results of the program are given, and a patent attorney from the legal department is also present. She approaches you afterwards and asks for copies of your notes and data on the program so she can begin to draft a patent application. After gathering the information, she interviews you and several of your colleagues about their various contributions. The patent application is prepared and filed with all necessary paperwork, and shortly thereafter, you are presented with paperwork and told to affix your signature. One of the documents asks you to sign below a statement that you believe yourself to be “the original inventor or an original inventor” of the claimed invention and that any willfully false statement may subject you to a fine or imprisonment! On another document, you are told that for $1 and other “good and valuable consideration” you assign your rights in the invention to PharmaCo. You sign the documents as do all of the other inventors. What did you just do?