On Inventor’s Right To Be Named In Patent Documents

With the increasing importance of intellectual property and the awakening of people’s right consciousness,disputes of inventorship are increasing year by year.However,what does not match with the need to protect the inventorship in practice is lack of attention from theorists,absence of a unified judgment standard and even a deviation in the cognition of the essence of the inventorship.Defining the inventor is the precondition for protecting inventorship.Therefore,how to correctly identify the inventor is the first thing to be done in relevant disputes.Compared with practical needs,the provisions of the patent law on how to identify inventors are relatively principled.So it is necessary to learn from overseas experience and summarize the experience from our judicial practice.Although the inventorship is not ambiguous in provisions,the confusion between the inventorship and authorship as well as the adverse standards in identifying the inventor has occurred in practice due to insufficient research.Inventorship is a personal right and ussually should be exercised by the inventor himself.Only when the inventor dies and the inventorship is infringed,the successor can claim the right on his behalf.The inventorship is realized by signing the patent documents with his real name,but under special conditions he may not be signed.When the inventorship is infringed,mediation,arbitration and litigation can be adopted for claiming rights.Among all the methods,litigation is most thorough where correct selection of eligible defendants and the reasonable determination of the scope of claim are important.