The importance of Lab Notebooks in showing inventorship

Yet another case of co-inventor issues arising from work in an academic setting is described in Patently-O: Patent Law Blog: Inventorship: Student Denied Co-Inventorship Opportunity (and also here. We’re seeing an increasing interest in PatentSafe from the academic sector, mainly as a quick & cheap way of avoiding such problems. Whilst this sort of dispute doesn’t happen all that often, when it does the legal bills alone would have paid for PatentSafe.

Interestingly, deploying such solutions into academia is rather different from an industrial setting, which caused us to add some additional features. The short version is “less is more”, as this environment doesn’t respond well to top-down imposition of complex systems. So we try to make PatentSafe as invisible as possible.