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Employee Patent Compensations?
Anonymous Coward asks: "My employer has recently filed a patent application for something I invented. As compensation I am being given the statutory $1 for the assignment and a shiny brass plaque if the patent(s) is awarded. Is this typical for North American companies? I did sign a no compensation and automatic assignment type employment contract and while I was willing to accept that technically, I'm owed nothing, this strikes me as cheap, greedy, and backward thinking on my employers part. I've Google'd and read and this action seems archaic, am I wrong and just full of myself? Your thoughts please!"
Why would they give you more than the minimum required, if you agreed to that minimum? Does it gain them anything? Are you honestly going to work less now because they didn't give you an unnecessary bonus?
(Disregard the above if your company is non-for-profit, employee-owned, or determined to get sued by stockholders.)
I've had this sig for three days.
- The only things you get to vote for as a shareholder are the directors and shareholder initiatives;
- Top management chooses the slate of directors and has great power to hold initiatives off the proxy ballot;
- No matter how many shareholders strike a director off the proxy ballot, that director is still elected if s/he gets so much as a single vote. The only way for shareholders to get rid of a director is to wage a proxy fight, which involves printing and mailing their own proxies to shareholders. This is a very expensive proposal. Worse,
- Shareholder initiatives are binding on no one, and the board and management are free to ignore them.
In theory, company management is responsible to shareholders. In practice, they are rarely responsible to anyone but themselves. (This message was brought to you nearly verbatim from that bastion of left-wing radical political theory, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.)Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
A client of mine, was a former Pratt & Whitney rocket scientist. He invented control systems and fuel systems for around a dozen rockets/engines, and has about 5 patents to his credit -- all for his employer.
He's got plaques to prove it, but that's about it. And he seemed pretty damn proud to have those, and loved explaining when I asked about them.
*Shrug* Was pretty cool to me...they don't *have* to give you anything.
I get $50 for the disclosure, and $2000 if the filing is accepted. The bonus is $4000 if the patent is in a "targeted" area.
I'm going to start disclosing a whole bunch of obvious stuff. Not that I necessarily want them patented, but just so our company has a legal record of their being implemented or used. I still can't get over Phillips being granted a patent for something my company had shipped five years prior to their filing. Our solution to the problem was to roll over and cross license our own stuff.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
IBM's invention policy is:
first patent: $1500 when it's filed, another $500 if the patent is awarded
any patents after that: $750, +$500 if patent awarded.
Every 4 patents you hit a "plateau" and get a bonus $1250 or so on top of everything else.
From the posts in this forum, sounds like that's actually a pretty nice system.