Tokyo

Not long ago, the typical response of a Japanese researcher who thought that their employer had stolen their ideas would have been a brief shrug of resignation. Often, they would have been content to entrust their fate to the company in exchange for gradual promotion over a lifetime of employment.

But times are changing, and these days more and more peeved innovators are opting for a different response — they're calling in a lawyer.

Industrial researchers in Japan are awarded patents as individuals, but they customarily sign these rights over to their employers. Patent law holds that researchers must be awarded “reasonable compensation” for patents that become lucrative.

The law doesn't say what “reasonable” means. But after last year's widely publicized lawsuit filed by Shuji Nakamura, inventor of the blue light-emitting diode (see Nature 412, 844; 2001), more researchers are going to the courts to find out.

In a lawsuit filed last month in the Tokyo district court, for example, Masayoshi Naruse says that the ¥10 million (US$80,000) he received in 2001 for his work on the artificial sweetener aspartame does not match up to the ¥23 billion that his former employer, Tokyo-based Ajinomoto, reportedly made from licensing the product in the United States between 1982 and 2000. His suit demands half of the profits made on the sweetener — with ¥2 billion as a first instalment.

In another lawsuit filed in the same court on 2 October, Hiroshi Ogawa took issue with the ¥100,000 he received for his patent on processing the vitamin-like substance inositol. Ogawa says that the patent, on a procedure to extract inositol from corn, has earned close to ¥2 billion for his former employer Shikishima Starch and its parent company Showa Sangyo of Tokyo. Ogawa is claiming 80% of these profits on the basis that the company actively sought to sideline his work. “They resist anything new,” he says.

Ogawa and Naruse are also claiming that they never legally transferred the patents to their employers and that control of the patents should revert to the discoverers.

In each case, the defending companies claim that they received the patents legally, and that the compensation given was fair. Ajinomoto says that Naruse's award was calculated as a percentage of profits according to a company compensation formula established in 1999 — and that his patent is just one of many related to the discovery and production of aspartame.

The cases reflect a new assertiveness on the part of Japan's industrial researchers. “The problem is that nobody has used this patent law to get reasonable compensation from a company until now, either because the researchers were very loyal to their companies or because they didn't understand patent law,” says Nakamura, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

As researchers become more aware of the profits to be made and less reliant on lifetime employment, Japan's employers are changing their approach. In the past few years, many companies, including Honda and Toyota, have revamped their reward systems to give researchers greater motivation.