Writing may want to also become a joint applicant on the patent applications, and so he should
talk to MRR about being added in, preferably before the statement of inventorship is due in November this year. As a co-owner he can trade in the application with MRRs
permission. I should check that he didn’t sign any agreements about ownership at
the time or when he got the job at MRR, but if not then he can also make the radio himself though he may not have the ability to do so. Maybe he should consider selling
his share to MMR instead. If MRR don’t want to cooperate then he can use entitlement
proceedings, remembering that the US application requires separate entitlement proceedings. If the minutes of the June meeting show that the client was the sole inventor of radio 2 after all, he should either request a transfer from MMR or if they
won’t cooperate then again entitlement proceedings. After the client became a senior researcher he invented the method of improving sound at low signal levels for radio
3 but he would probably be expected to invent such things and also may be required
to let the company have it anyway; I can check his contract to confirm. He should check for when the patent is granted as he will be unemployed by then and so should
consider seeking compensation from MRR since he will not really be in a position to
benefit from the invention’s success. However this can be very difficult to do especially
if as in this case it is unclear how much of the radio’s success is down to marketing and suchlike or in fact whether the development of the radio has even lead to anything
valuable yet, so he should not hold his breath. Then at some point when at home the client realised that these improvements could also work in mobile phones, but he is a bit unsure about the details of how come MRR ended up owning the invention. It’s
possible that MRR owned it because he was a very senior inventor at the time in which
case he can again consider seeking compensation from MRR at grant, but this time he
can point to the license being definitely worth ten million pounds, which would seem to rule out most of MRR’s involvement in terms of marketing, etc though of course it may be that if the client as an individual had had the patent then Colour Mobile would not have been interested in talking to just him or have much confidence in the invention so it is still hard to quantify how much of that money is down to MRR and
its licensing team, so again he might run into difficulties with this. He’ll need to wait until the patent is granted anyway to find out. Of course it is possible that despite
being senior he still owns the invention, and I will ask the client to be more clear about what papers he signed about this and whether he really received the commemorative
coin. I think that you probably don’t dream up stuff like that so he probably assigned it to MRR, so once the patent is granted he can argue that the one pound is not very
much when compared to the large amount that Colour Mobile are willing to pay for a licence under the employee-owner compensation law, but if he didn’t then he could
sue for ownership and then licence to Colour Mobile himself. I think that the client could probably use this issue to apply some pressure to any discussions regarding radio
3 or 2 that come up and so these should all be orchestrated carefully. I think that this will help the client to secure some reward for his inventions in the UK (and the US) by improving his position on the radios and mobile phone.
Study Guide to the Patents Acts (2021 edition)
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