I now have my name on a second patent. 7,034,916 is basically our old patent 6,812,994 with a few little changes to incorporate some changes we (I) made to indicate whether the feature is ready to play or not.
Take a look at the list of inventors. Curtis is the only other programmer on that list, and he left the company last year before we did this change. Everybody else is middle management and the guy from Corporate Design and Usability whose sole contribution to this change from the old one was to say that we should use blue rather than green to indicate the “ready to play” status. The guys responsible for the code that sends up the information from the feature player as to whether the status is good or not aren’t mentioned on the patent, just me because I take that information and change the colour of the blob of colour on the screen and provide a tooltip. But the guy who signs my timesheet is. That doesn’t seem fair to me.
If the “invention” is owned by the company, it really matters little who is on the inventor list. Maybe it’s a resume-padder, but how many enlightened employers look longingly on this kind of thing?
I don’t think the patent office cares whom exactly the applicants name, so it may not be fair to criticize “the system”, rather than “the company”, at least on that basis.