Home Concept Map Back to Gatorade 16. The development of Gatorade required that the inventors make judgements about the impact of the beverage on the athletes. They must try to sort out the relationship of the beverage to fatigue, eliminating or explaining all other factors or observations. The ownership decision balances the legal requirements for patent - material that is new, useful and not obvious and the proper balance of the rights of the University the public through the government and the inventors who applied basic chemical principals in a new and unanticipated way. An invention is something new, useful, and not obvious.
Patents protect the rights of inventors to their inventions.
A United States Patent prohibits anyone but its owners from making, using or selling the invention as described by the claims in the patent for twenty years after the inventors file their patent application. Cade, Shires, and their coworkers made an agreement with A. J. Stokely to commercialize Gatorade . The doctors and Stokely began to prepare U.S. patents that, under rules in force at the time, would by law exclude others from making the beverage for 17 years after the patent issued. As soon as the University and the government recognized Gatorade was becoming successful, they, too, made claims on Gatorade ownership. The University stated the doctors were employees of the University, thus the benefits of work the doctors did as employees belonged to the University.