On #1, the answer would be yes if they really did co-own it and had no other contract regulating terms of their co-ownership (unlikely). Under U.S. law (not tru

On #1, the answer would be yes if they really did co-own it and had no other contract regulating terms of their co-ownership (unlikely). Under U.S. law (not true everywhere!), co-owners of a patent each have an independent right to exploit and/or non-exclusively license the patent, without consultation with the other co-owners, unless they've entered an agreement providing for other terms of co-ownership. This is also true for copyrights on jointly authored work, incidentally. However, companies usually just get the patent assigned to them by the employee, in return for some token compensation (varies, sometimes it's really token, like $1, other companies will pay employees $100-$1000 per patent). One place where it can sometimes come up is that a co-inventor who was omitted from the patent application can later try to get him/herself retroactively added. Trying to dig up such people, get them added, and then buy a license from that person is one strategy for defending a patent lawsuit. E.g. if IBM bought a patent from a university spinoff, you could try to dig up a grad student who can document he/she co-invented the relevant technology but wasn't listed on the patent, get them added, then license it from them. Since they now co-own the patent with IBM, you only need to license it from either them or IBM, so IBM's suit fails. I think doing this successfully is pretty rare, but there's a fairly famous case: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8929550350181055569 http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8929550350181055...