This entirely ignores the politics that lead to people listed on a patent that contributed nothing. It happens a lot, if not almost always, on patents filed by employees at a large company.
Sure, but say I come up with a novel idea. I run that idea past another lead as a sanity check, but I do most of the work myself. At one large company we were at the point where if the patent folk came around again it was our plan to milk the process. (Especially after we worked for three years on what was supposed to be a common data format for interchange between manufacturers, OEMs and customers and some halfwit thought it would be a great idea to patent the whole thing at the end. Asshole. We became highly motivated to publish our docs to start the patent clock ticking and eventually got the whole idea canned.)
In a world where the company is going to patent my work no matter what my opinion is,, 'collaborating' with people I didn't really need to collaborate with is a net positive for me.
One, I can let them make or review draft documents so that I'm not the one doing all of the bullshit paperwork. If they participate in the vetting and documentation process (especially the 'arguing with the patent attorneys' over scope and wording), then they legitimately collaborated on the patent. We extract more dollars from the bounty system and we make frivolous patents slightly more expensive.
Then when one of those two people think up an idea on their own, why not put me on it, especially if I offer the same kind of help?
yeah I was thinking the same, and wanted to look at IBM because of that reason to see if the larger nodes matched middle meddling managers that hold the keys to the patent process, but the search turned up only some hundred patent, which is weird because it's touted as the largest patent holder ever... oh well.
