Gattari on What Inventorship Is Not

According to "Determining Inventorship for US Patent Applications," by Patrick Gattari, the following points should help in an inventorship determination:

An inventor is:

• A person who conceives the subject matter of at least one claim of the patent.
• Two or more persons who collaborate to produce the invention through aggregate efforts.

An inventor is not:

• Someone whose only contribution is reducing an invention to practice by exercising ordinary skill in theart.
• A technician who simply performs experiments or assembles the invention.
• The supervisor or department manager of the person who conceived the invention.
• Someone whose only contribution is an obvious element to the invention.
• Someone whose only contribution is participation in consultations about the invention before or after conception of the invention.
• A person who only conceives of the result to be obtained but not the idea of how to achieve it.
• A person who only discovers the problem (unless he contributes to the solution).
• A person who merely provides a suggestion or improvement but who does not
work to fit the suggestion or improvement into the invention.
• A second inventor of the subject matter of the invention who did not collaborate with a first inventor ofthe subject matter of the invention.