Legal successor
This phrase, as such, came to us via the Hungarian-Magyar "jogutódja", found on several Hungarian original patent documents.
- Patent HU-1916-76416 gives Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft m.b.H. as the 100% rightsholder on this patent and as the legal successor to Franz Schneider, giving the spelling "jogutódja", which seems to be the predominant spelling, and it is the one which comes back up when translating from English into Magyar-Hungarian.
- Patent HU-1915-76876 gives Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft m.b.H. as the 100% rightsholder on this patent and as the legal successor to Franz Schneider, giving the spelling "jogutóda", which may be an antique typographical error.
- Patent HU-1913-66701 has a physician and a factory manager as the legal successors to Max Martin Bock.
- Patent HU-1908-47569 has a landlord, possibly the landlord of the inventor, as the legal successor to the inventor Lajos Loránt.
- Patent HU-1896-9899 has “F. Gaebert Berlin Company As the Successor(likely legal successor) to the Imperial Government Counselor Joseph Hofmann in Berlin”.
A search, within our data, of "legal successor", brings up a case or two in which one company is the legal successor to another. These inter-corporate instances of the phrase are of a slightly different interest.
That aside, we may or may not find direct analogues to the Hungarian-Magyar "jogutódja", in other languages, in the patent documents filed with other national offices. Luft-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft m.b.H. filing as the 100% rightsholder and as the legal successor to Franz Schneider fits into inventor-company patterns with which we are familiar. Filing by a "legal successor" will fall naturally into the phenomenon of "Applicant is inventor? - No" designation. These are all instances of third party filing, with presumed vested interests, beyond those of the inventor(s) in question, behind the filing of the patent, with likely pertinence to the quality patent, or high quality patent, as opposed to the low quality patent.
As a matter of related phraseology Patent US-1920-1459223 gives us an instance of a widow acting as an "executrix".
