MIT accuses company of denying its researcher credit for anti-cancer device | Hacker News Reader

MIT accuses company of denying its researcher credit for anti-cancer device

universalhub.com

22 pointsilamont6 comments

This reminds me a little of a book I just read "The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer"

A similar thing happened between Atanasoff and the guys who designed ENIAC. It led to a huge court battle in the 70s where Honywell & CDC were fighting IBM and cie's patents. It was found out that John Mauchly, one of the two main creators of ENIAC, visited Atanasoff in Iowa while Atanasoff was building the first electronic digital computer (I'm sure that's debated) and learn enough about it that the court found that the patents he held with J. Presper Eckert were most likely lifted from research Atanasoff was doing.

The fact that those patents have been overturned today is good, else IBM would have killed the early PC industry.

ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer, by Scott McCartney presents a slightly different view of the court case. It says that though the courts were on shaky legal ground throwing the patents out (there were fundamental differences between the ABC and ENIAC) it was really done to advance the computing industry, similar to how one of the Ford's (I think) early patents on the engine was ruled to only cover 2 cylinder engines (by that time most cars were onto 4 cylinders, effectively preventing Ford from maintaining a monopoly).

My understanding, from having filed a bunch of patents for different companies, is that getting the inventors wrong is a Big Deal. Our IP lawyers told us emphatically that we needed to make sure anyone involved with an invention was a listed author.

I have heard the exact same thing. Any patent attorneys on here who can explain the things that can go pearshaped?

Yes, getting the inventors wrong is a bad thing. Every inventor has an ownership of the invention and initially has an ownership of the patent that results from it. Usually when a company files a patent, they make sure they get all inventors to sign assignments which give their rights to the invention and patent to the company. But if they did not get all inventors to sign, and an unnamed inventor can later prove that he/she was actually one of the inventors, then the unnamed inventor will be held to be part owner of the patent and any inventions that are listed in there.

Thus, a company can invest tens of thousands of dollars into a patent and millions of dollars into developing the patented technology and then an unnamed inventor may appear out of the blue and claim ownership.

So yes, it is important to name all the actual inventors.

BTW, this is not legals advice, just academic, theoretic discussion. There are many more complicated issues that can and will come up in real life, so I hope nobody actually tries to extract legal advice from this.

I'd like to see the sponsored research agreement. MIT specifies these things in all contacts. Not good for all parties involved because destroys much "value".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com