Community Ownership of Patent Rights

According to the January 2005 issue of "I.P. Monthly," community ownership of patents is best created by co-inventors assigning their rights to a corporate entity:

With the use of a corporate form each of the co-inventors can enjoy the
financial benefits of jointly owned property, without the property being owned
by any one of the co-inventors. This is true because the corporation is
considered a person under the law, so the corporate entity will own the patent
and the coinventors will own their respective shares in the corporate entity -
not in the patent itself. While Nancy Weres may well have had a claim to
one-half interest in Oleh’s interest in his share of a corporate entity, she
would not have become a co-owner of the patents. For more information see Weres
v. Weres, 2005 U.S. App. LEXIS 386 (Fed. Cir., January 11, 2005).

Depending upon state property laws, the same can sometimes also be said for other types of business entites.