Court Standards on Joint Inventorship and Authorship

Steven S. Kan, College of Economics, Zhejiang University, China

Abstract

Sequential workflow steps in creating knowledge works and complementary intellectual endeavors in collaboration are focused to reveal opportunistic behaviors lurking in the step of fixing intellectual fruit into a tangible medium and the control of decision making authority over a knowledge project. A review of frequently cited cases shows that joint inventorship standards are efficient, while joint authorship standards developed recently are inefficient. The root cause of the disparity is traced to the copyright law’s failure to insist on the truthful identity of the subject making intellectual contribution, for which patent law even mandates a patent repeal when necessary.