Video Transcript

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Hey, Gary Schuster here with Innovation Cafe, and today I want to talk with you about patent assignments. Yeah, I know — patent assignments, possibly one of the more boring areas of one of the more boring areas of law. But they’re really important.

It turns out that if you use the wrong magic language when you’re trying to acquire a patent, you might not get the patent. Typically it works like this: if I write a contract that says, “I agree that I will assign my patent rights to you,” the patent rights aren’t assigned. You actually have to get them to do it afterwards. And if you forget to do it before the statute of limitations runs out, they’re going to own the patent, not you.

So it has to be active language — “I shall and hereby do.” Now, talk to your lawyer before doing it. Don’t rely on this — this is not legal advice, this is practical advice. But you definitely want to make sure that the language in any patent assignment is rock solid, because one little error is very expensive.