Companies looking to claim ownership of the inventions of their employees got a boost on Monday when Manhattan federal district court Judge John Koeltl held that IBM owns three patents on an invention that was the work of a former part-time employee who used her off hours to create ways to link electronic files to pictures.
The inventor behind the patents, Michelle Baker, had been a part-time employee with IBM’s TJ Watson Lab in the early 1990s while she was a doctoral student at Columbia University. Baker had signed a contract with IBM giving the company ownership of anything she invented while she was there. In a decision made public Monday Judge Koeltl ruled that the agreement “clearly applies” to the invention. Judge Koeltl wrote that to rule against IBM would “needlessly cloud title to the patents and invite duplicative litigation should IBM seek to enforce any of its rights as owner of the patents.”
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