Protecting Your Ideas

If you’re someone who is curiously inventive, you might want to brush up on this law!

With the Arbeitnehmererfindungsgesetz, or law on employee inventions, it stipulates the grounds between and employer and employee with regards to inventions made while employed.

There are two types of inventions:

• Service Invention: ideas or inventions that are discovered as a direct relation to the work that you are doing. For example: you work as an engineer at a company that is within the AI space, and you come up with a new way to use AI for a product idea. That invention is something that parallels your work and is potentially a direct result of your daily work.

• Free Inventions: Ideas of inventions that are discovered with no relation to the work you do. For example: you’re an engineer at a company that is within the AI space and you have the idea for a new type of hair care product.

If any type of invention is made during working hours, it technically first belongs to the employer. Of course, if what the employee has created could be of great benefit to the company, it is in their best interest for the company to keep it for themselves. In case they choose to patent the invention, there is still an obligation for the employer to list the employee as the inventor and pay the employee a percentage of the profits.

However, if the employer chooses to release the product - i.e. does not have any interest in having the invention, the employee can then patent and sell the product as their own.

Of course - there can be advantages and disadvantages to both! Either way, one should be mindful of what they create and when (i.e. during the work day or not) to ensure what they create can be used to their own discretion.

There can also be technical suggestions for improvement, which aren’t inventions per se but could have a dramatic effect on the business one is working for. In this case the employee might not be the inventor but they can perhaps ask for remuneration or credit for the work done.