I am working for a renowned patent law firm in France and I am forced to remain anonymous.

I’d like to break a taboo. A patent taboo.

Patent laws state that anyone contributing to claims defining an invention shall be cited as inventors (“true inventor” in the USA). If a true inventor is not cited, the patent application can be considered invalid (“inventorship”).

Some clients willing to file a patent application sometimes (often in fact) provide patent attorneys with a single slide or drawing. That is with very few words (way less than an abstract of 150 words).

In turn, patent attorneys are expected to produce a 20 pages document (10 pages is a bare minimum and the standard is 20 pages).

In fact they do, because they are paid for this task. And because providing adverse evidence that the true inventor has not been cited is very hard to obtain (a patent attorney cannot speak-up, he would loose both his client and his job).

Yet this practice is against the law. Drafting the patent application from a minimalist idea, patent attorneys have to do way more than filling the gaps of the seed idea. They have to invent, literally. These patent attorneys are never ever cited as inventors in patent applications. The number of virtually invalid patents is enormous, as this practice is highly generalized and tolerated.

I can’t count the number of dependent claims and pages of my patent applications that have nothing to do with the few words I was provided with. Same for all of my colleagues. Many of these patent applications have been granted.

This is not fair. This is not even legal, in the first place.

When are we going to change this hypocrisy ? If applicable, it would be fair and legal to cite as an inventor the patent attorney who has drafted the application, along the initial one.

Thanks for your time