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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!"
My thoughts are that the Anonymous Coward link shouldn't have an email address if Bill Keegan wants to remain anonymous!
...if the patent proves valuable, and they don't feel the need to compensate you directly, you should be viewed as an exceptionally good catch for some other company.
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.
My company pays up to $2500 or so per inventor named on the patent, up to 3 inventors. If there are more than three, then they take the max 7.5k and divide it equally.
:)
Just a number. Doesn't mean I'd be any richer than you, after paying taxes and all, but at least I can buy my own shiny new plaque.
I think the usual practice in america is more like a couple thousand dollars and a shiny brass plaque.
I wouldn't lose sleep over the bonus. Instead, remember to mention your patent at your next performance review. Even if you don't get a bonus from it directly it may be a useful bargaining chip for future compensation.
you luck bastard. all i got was a pile of stock options.
"My employer has recently filed a patent application for something I invented."
And yet you still left out something very important - you invented it on company time (or even used a little bit of company time) and you've been on the payroll since before concieved of the invention, and , in fact, you were employed in order to benefit the company - including anything you invent while working for the company.
You have been paid for, are being paid for, and will likely continue to be paid for the invention - it's called a salary or paycheck.
I'm sorry if you didn't understand the terms of your employment.
Besides, you can get the answer to your question from Google, which will show you that it's a fairly commonly asked question
As far as what is typical in the industry - typically the inventor gets nothing but name recognition. If the invention makes the company a million, they tend to treat you better, but it still shows as zip on your paycheck (except your raises may be slightly higher than usual for awhile)
You might be able to work something out if you are a contractor and can show that you developed the invention for general use in your contracting business, and not for this specific client, but then you get to be the cost bearer of obtaining the patent, and likely (as with the vast majority of inventions) you will never recoup those costs.
It's better to put the invention down on your resume, and work it from the angle of, "I can do good things for your company" rather than trying to say with your current employer, "Hey, where's my piece of the pie?". Likely your piece of the pie will be somewhere outside the office very shortly thereafter.
-Adam
It's a standard part of US employment law that if you are indeed an employee rather than an independent contractor that any intellecual property that you generate does in fact belong lock stock and barrel to your employer. They don't even owe you the shiny dollar.
Some companies are more generous, offering a few shares of stock or whatever.
I know in Europe you have a somewhat better situation, especially if the invention is worth a LOT of money in the long run, but how far that goes I don't know.
I never thought it was a big deal in my job - generating these things was what I was being paid for, and in reality very few patents ever turn out to be commercially valuable anyway.
Furthermore, if democracy is so grand, why aren't companies democratic? As well, if this is a republic, why don't we own our workplaces.
More than 50% of working Americans own stock in publically traded companies. That stock usually comes with voting rights for the owners. This makes companies both owned by the workers, and democratic.
- 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!
Where I work, it's made pretty clear that contractors aren't real people. Nowhere is this more evident than the patent-compensation system. 'Real' employees get a $2,500 bonus. After 5 patents, I believe it's a $10,000 bonus. Not bad. Contractors get NOTHING. Not even a plaque. A guy who works in the same lab as I do has his name on 3 patents, and he has never gotten any recognition whatsoever.
So... don't expect anything for a patent unless you have an agreement guaranteeing compensation. Companies don't give a crap about their employees anymore, and just want to use you up until they can find an Indian/Philipino to replace you for 1/5 the cost.
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.
That's corporate life in the 21st century (and has been for a while). Loyalty is an outdated idea. Companies are showing less and less loyalty to employees, and employees are returning the favor.
As far as I'm concerned, the difference between being a full-time employee and a contractor boils down to compensation. Salaried employees trade a higher hourly rate for a fixed salary and additional non-monetary but quanitifiable benefits. Also, the government treats you differently for tax purposes. Period.
Anything else is above and beyond the call. The company will most likely lay the employee off in a heartbeat if they feel the need, and the employee will jump ship at a moment's notice for better pay or a more interesting job. Companies have forgotten how much more valuable a properly-trained and experienced senior employee can be, and employees have forgotten the less tangible benefits of staying with a firm for an extended period of time.
Like almost everyone else in modern American business, no real attention is being paid to the long-term. Only short-term gains are considered. An employee will bail for a 10% increase in pay, while a company will treat people like a commodity and swap them around and dump them for the slightest reason.
Unfortunately, in this climate, intangibles don't count for much, because you can't depend on loyalty being rewarded with loyalty. The companies are to blame when the concept of downsizing and commoditization of employees because more important than treating people like people. Now the shoe's on the other foot and employees aren't giving loyalty either, because they don't expect they will get it.
Unfortunately, the culture now is very much a mercenary culture, and it is stuck in a vicious circle being fed by things like frequent job changes, outsource overseas, the increasing reliance on temp workers, etc.
So, while the company doesn't _owe_ you anything more than a handshake and maybe a plaque (in addition to your salary), if they are wise, they will cultivate your obvious value, and you, in turn, should reciprocate, building a stronger and more valuable relationship.
In my case, I have at times, not shown as much loyalty as I maybe should have, because I am not a patient person, and am unwilling to suffer through a project of a year or more on the chance that the next one will be something I actually want to do. By the same token, I have been lied to, indirectly at least, and treated very unfairly on more than one occasion. The biggest problem I have had, as a long time (15+ years) expert developer that does not want to go into management, is being put in a situation more appropriate for a junior-level programmer, where I cannot utilize my expertise in a way that provides interest to me nor maximizes the company's benefit of my long years of experience. In my current job, I have literally been told nmy work is too good. If every piece of what I develop is not understandable by every programmer (at a shop that is light-weight on progammer talent), then it shouldn't be done that way. Given the impressive resume that I provide, wiuth its emphasis on improving the status quo, and developing sophisticated tools and solutions, it seems rather dishonest to state that I am a good match for the position, because after almost 6 months, I know I clearly am not. If and when I find alternative work, I will take it immediately, despite the fact that I hate to leave after such a short time, and yet, if the culture of the company (for which software development is of peripheral importance, as evidenced by the quotes "We are a bunch of hacks. This is a garage shop." They do brute-force, copy-and-paste work which would have looked archaic 10 years ago) had been described to me honestly, I would have realized it was a bad match up front. One thing I can be honest about is that I get bored easily and I am neither happy or productive when I am bored. I don't think it's fair to hire someone with 10+ years of C++ experience as a C++ p
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I too have received the obligatory 1 dollar for a patent I helped develop. Consider that under law you did the work for them when you created the invention. Doesn't it make some sense that the invention is rightly owned by the corporation?
Further, did you pay the 10K to 20K dollars to file the patent? Yeah - the patent itself doesn't cost that much (more like $2k I think) but the lawyers that wrote it did.
So - what did you have on the line versus the company. You received your normal compensation and the company through in say another $10K on top of your compensation to receive the patent. Seems to me they have a moral right to it too!
Now - if you did something on your own dime, and the company tried claiming that as well - this is another discussion all together. That doesn't seem to be the case in the initial query though. I happen to live in CA - with all it's OTHER faults (and there are so so many) CA does have a law on the books since around 1980 that if I develop the idea on my own time with my own resources, then NDA or not, I own it.
That's my two cents worth.
Have you compiled your kernel today??