Re: Power of Attorney in Employment Agreement

Heather Vargas wrote on 9/25/2006 12:35 PM:

>I have seen a few employment and independent contractor agreements recently that contain a power of attorney from the employee/contractor to the employer/company to prosecute copyright/patent applications or otherwise act in the employee's stead with respect to intellectual property matters for work done for the company. Has anyone seen any case law on whether this is acceptable? Any opinions on whether this is a good/bad idea? Necessary? For those in favor, does anyone have good form language that they might be willing to share?
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We used to do this sometimes, years ago.

But then we wised up.

Our client is typically the employer/company. Taking a power of attorney from some employee of the company or a contractor of the company, runs the risk of being a conflict of interest. So now we never do this.

So for example in a PCT application we simply have each inventor designate the company as "common representative" and then the CR grants a POA to us.

In a copyright application we arrange for the authors to assign their rights (and to promise to assign their rights) over to the company and the company grants a POA to us.

Same thing for a patent application. The inventors promise to assign their rights to the company, and then they do assign their rights to the company, and then the company grants POA to us. Received on Tue Sep 26 2006 - 03:20:45 GMT