Kennedy: “It’s also possible…
Kennedy: “It’s also possible that he did not contract away his IP rights to inventions.”
Except that he doesn’t have any natural rights to demand tribute for the use of the invention—unless his employer made some kind of contract with him agreeing to give him exclusionary control over their use of things he made while he was working for them.
Maybe they did make such a contract, but there isn’t any evidence of that in the story, and it would certainly make the court case much more open-and-shut than it seems to have been, since the issue wouldn’t have been “IP” but rather breach of contract. Broadly speaking, if I’m paying you to show me how to make things, and I go on to make the things that you show me, the amount that you negotiated for your job up-front is precisely what you should have the right to demand. I may like brilliant inventors a lot more than I like the sanctimonious money-men who drive most of the intellectual enclosure movement these days, but that doesn’t make putting the fences up on other people’s rightly acquired property any less odious.
Anticopyright.