The Federal Trade Commission has filed enforcement actions against more than a dozen invention promotion outfits since 1994 under the American Inventors Protection Act. The pattern repeats: glossy marketing, vague promises, big upfront fees, and a contract that...
“Invention assistance companies” is a loose phrase. It covers patent attorneys, product design firms, prototyping shops, and marketing and licensing services, and an inventor searching the term gets all four mixed together with no map. The phrase is broad...
Most invention transactions are licenses, not buyouts, and the three structures companies use to pay inventors split between those two poles. But a meaningful share of patents, somewhere between 8 and 15 percent of completed inventor-to-company deals depending on the...
About 95 percent of all U.S. patents never earn the inventor a single dollar. The other 5 percent get there one of three ways: a license, a full buyout, or a hybrid that combines elements of both. Each path has different tax treatment, different upside, different...
