Michigan Law Review Volume 110 Issue 5 2012 The Myth of the Sole Inventor Mark A. Lemley Stanford Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr Part of the Intellectual Property Law Commons Recommended Citation Mark A. Lemley, The Myth of the Sole Inventor, 110 MICH. L. REV. 709 (2012). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol110/iss5/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Michigan Law Review at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE MYTH OF THE SOLE INVENTORt Mark A. Lemley* The theory of patent law is based on the idea that a lone genius can solve problems that stump the experts, and that the lone genius will do so only if properly incented. But the canonical story of the lone genius inventor is largely a myth. Surveys of hundreds of significant new technologies show that almost all of them are invented simultaneously or nearly simultaneous- ly by two or more teams working independently of each other. Invention appears in significant part to be a social, not an individual, phenomenon. The result is a real problem for classic theories of patent law. Our domi- nant theory of patent law doesn't seem to explain the way we actually implement that law. Maybe the problem is not with our current patent law, but with our current patent theory.