Q: Is the person who did the most experiments of the patent has the right to be on the patent inventorship?

A: To be named as an inventor on a patent, a person must have intellectually contributed to the invention described in at least one claim. A lab technician who runs all experiments may be named as an inventor if he/she devised some questions and experiments on their own to address a point of interest in the research beyond the experiments they were told to perform.

A: An inventor is someone that contributed an inventive suggestion that ended up in the issued claims for a patent. So it is not necessarily a list of the people that worked the hardest on the project.

Just as there are different skills between an architect and a bricklayer, a project to develop a new product may use different skills. Often, building and testing prototypes or making precise CAD models require special skills and a lot of hard work. But that alone does not make a person an inventor.

Likewise the team manager is not always an inventor just because the team that made the product is within the span of control of that manager.

As the list of claims change during the effort to obtain the patent, then the list of inventors may change too. The list of inventors should always match up with the current set of claims.

If you suspect that you may have made contributions that ended up in the claims, take a look at the claim language and try to find a phrase in the claims that would not be there except for your input. If you find one or more phrases of that sort, work through your work place to get this discussed. As a patent attorney, I tend to err on being a bit overinclusive and will add someone that has a decent argument that the person is indeed an inventor. Sometimes this gets sticky in a company with financial rewards for being named an inventor as many people try to get added when they may not be true inventors.

I hope that this helps.

Kevin E Flynn