Patent rights assignment

質問

Company S used to have a wholly owned subsidiary in the UK (“S-UK.”) S eventually shut down S-UK. S-UK held a number of patent assets.

S dissolved the S-UK legal entity circa 2010. The liquidator hired for this process did not have S-UK sign any forms expressly assigning the S-UK held patent assets to S. The liquidator claims that they were not aware of any S-UK intangible assets, including any patents. We have not found any “catch-all” assignments where S-UK assigned all of its assets, or all remaining assets, to S. We did find a board resolution authorizing the liquidator to distribute all of the assets of S-UK to its owners (of which there was just S at that time.)

We would like to register S as the owner of these patent assets. They are mostly in the U.S., EP (France, Germany, UK, mostly via the EPC). There are also some in JP, AU, CA, MX, TW.

Is there an easy way to do so under this scenario?

or

回答: 3 public & 1 非公開

77f6bb54dc
弁理士

I agree with Steven and Hanns-Juergen that it would probably be best to record the assignment separately in each country because of the different requirements in each country. For example, you mentioned that the patent assets include patent cases in Australia. In Australia, an assignment document has to be executed by both the assignor and the assignee. In some countries, only the assignor needs to execute the assignment document. It may be possible to prepare an assignment document that satisfies all these requirements. However, this would require you to invest the time and effort to determine the individual requirements in each country and prepare the consolidated assignment document and get it executed. There may also be country-specific requirements including translation, notarization and legalization of the assignment document which would further complicate matters. The easiest way forward appears to be to contact your patent attorneys in each of these countries to prepare an assignment document best suited for their practice and execute the lot at the same time.

最近の質問