Adding to the many new patent bills introduced in the House of Representatives over the summer and covered in this space, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) has put forward a measure of his own designed to bolster the rights of inventors who maintain ownership over their patents.
Every patent names a distinct inventor or group of inventors, but the rights to the vast majority of US patents are assigned by those inventors to their employers (often large corporations) or other entities. But HR 6557, the Inventor Protection Act (IPA), expressly recognizes and offers special treatment for “inventor-owned patents,” which the legislation defines as patents “held entirely by the inventor of the claimed invention.”
