The narrative of inventor as innovator is fundamental to patent law and has driven the development of inventorship doctrine. But that narrative is often false. Patent law uses the term “inventor” to identify individuals in a wide range of circumstances, including when there has been no innovation at all. This Article exposes how inventorship doctrine crumbles when confronted with the full range of settings in which “inventors” are named.

Understanding inventorship doctrine’s incoherence requires several novel analyses. First, I contribute a comprehensive taxonomy of inventorship’s functions, going beyond the conventional narrative of inventor as innovator. Second, I address a foundational question about inventors: if an inventor is someone who invents a patent’s “invention,” how is that “invention” defined? The Federal Circuit has never explicitly answered this question. A careful analysis of the court’s many inventorship decisions, however, suggests different and inconsistent answers. I characterize some of these answers as “intrinsic” approaches to naming inventors (i.e., based on information within the patent filing) — for instance, defining the invention based on the full scope of the claims — and others as “extrinsic” approaches (i.e., requiring outside knowledge) — for instance, defining the invention based on the claims’ point of patentability. Third, combining my taxonomies of inventorship’s functions and definitions of “the invention,” I explain why no one definition can apply across the full range of settings in which inventors are named. Intrinsic approaches, for instance, misallocate the patent reward because they cannot account for the innovative value of an individual’s contribution. Extrinsic approaches, on the other hand, are impossible to implement in practice because they require information that is rarely available. I do not prescribe a particular solution, but these analyses provide the doctrinal underpinnings for reform.