# Employee Invention Assignment in Mississippi[^about] Mississippi has no employee-invention-assignment statute and no Mississippi appellate decision found in our review construes such a clause on the merits, so an assignment clause is bounded only by ordinary contract law, the common-law default rules, and the federal patent and copyright overlay — not a California-style own-time carve-out or notice requirement. Absent a written assignment the inventor owns unless hired to invent, and the enforceability of a post-employment holdover clause is unsettled — no Mississippi authority found in our review, and even the covenant-reasonableness analogy from Redd Pest Control v. Heatherly is untested for invention holdovers. ## Can a Mississippi employer require assignment of every invention? {#statutory-carve-out} **Short answer.** There is no statutory ceiling. Unlike California or New York, Mississippi has no employee-invention-assignment statute — nothing that voids an assignment of a true own-time, own-resource invention — so an assignment clause's reach is bounded only by ordinary contract law, the common-law inventor-owns default, and the federal patent and copyright overlay. No Mississippi appellate decision found in our review construes such a clause on the merits either — the one Supreme Court of Mississippi case in which an employee invention-assignment agreement figures decided only a procedural question — and the baseline any contract operates against is that rights in an invention belong to the inventor [^singarayar-agreement][^stanford-baseline]. Because there is no statute on point, the limits come from general principles rather than a legislative carve-out. Nothing in Title 71 of the Mississippi Code (Labor and Industry — nine chapters covering the employment relationship, workers' compensation, unemployment, drug testing, and related subjects) or Title 75 (Regulation of Trade, Commerce and Investments) addresses employee inventions, and Mississippi appears on no national list of the states — California, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington — that have enacted a § 2870-style own-time carve-out. Keyword sweeps invite two false positives. Title 71 contains a wage-assignment provision, which governs assignments of wages, not of inventions; and chapter 26 of Title 75 is the Mississippi Uniform Trade Secrets Act, Miss. Code Ann. §§ 75-26-1 to 75-26-19, which governs the secrecy of unpatented information but says nothing about what an invention-assignment clause may capture. Chapter 21 of the same title — trusts and combines in restraint of trade — is an antitrust chapter, not an employment-covenant framework. One sourcing note in the interest of transparency: the official Mississippi Code is published on a Lexis platform that resists automated full-text search, so this review ran against the 2024 edition of the code as mirrored on Justia, cross-checked against national surveys of the statutory carve-out states. The nearest thing to Mississippi-specific authority is *American Elec., a Div. of FL Industries v. Singarayar*, the one Supreme Court of Mississippi decision found in our review in which an employee invention-assignment agreement figures. An engineer signed the agreement at hiring and later left for a competitor; the opinion records the instrument as an ordinary contract [^singarayar-agreement]. "On that date he signed an ‘Agreement for Assignment of Inventions and Covenant Against Disclosure’ (hereinafter ‘employment agreement’). The employment agreement contained no non-competition clause."[^singarayar-agreement] *Singarayar* decided nothing about the clause's reach. The Supreme Court of Mississippi held only that the trial court's preliminary injunction did not warrant an interlocutory appeal under its Rule 5(a), so the agreement's enforceability was never construed on the merits. Mississippi therefore starts — and, for now, ends — with contract law. The substantive default that contract law operates against is the federal patent premise restated in *Stanford v. Roche*: absent an effective assignment, rights in an invention belong to the person who conceived it [^stanford-baseline]. "Since 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor."[^stanford-baseline] The practical consequence is that a Mississippi employer can, in principle, contract for assignment more broadly than a California or Washington employer, because no statute carves out own-time inventions from the reach of the clause. That breadth is still not unlimited — an assignment clause is an ordinary contract term subject to contract-law defenses, and where it operates as a restraint on the former employee it invites Mississippi's judge-made reasonableness scrutiny of restrictive covenants, discussed in the trailing-clause question below. But there is no statutory own-time safe harbor for the employee to invoke and no statutory ceiling for the drafter to code around. ## Must a Mississippi employer notify the employee? {#employee-notice} **Short answer.** Not applicable. Because Mississippi has no invention-assignment statute, there is no statutory carve-out to notify the employee about and no notice requirement of the kind California imposes under Labor Code § 2872 or Washington imposes under RCW 49.44.140(3). Whatever invention-assignment duties bind a Mississippi employee arise from the contract itself — the one Supreme Court of Mississippi case featuring such an agreement records it as a purely contractual instrument, with no statutory apparatus attached [^singarayar-contract-instrument]. There is nothing to give notice of. A notice requirement exists in California and Washington precisely to alert the employee to a statutory own-time carve-out that limits the assignment; Mississippi has enacted no such carve-out, so there is no statutory line for a notice to mark. This is why the entry is marked not applicable rather than a bare no — the question presupposes a statutory carve-out that Mississippi does not have. The Mississippi record bears this out. In *American Elec., a Div. of FL Industries v. Singarayar*, the invention-assignment and nondisclosure duties the employer sued to protect came entirely from the agreement the engineer signed at hiring — the opinion describes the instrument itself, and no statutory notice or disclosure formality figures anywhere in the litigation [^singarayar-contract-instrument]. "On that date he signed an ‘Agreement for Assignment of Inventions and Covenant Against Disclosure’ (hereinafter ‘employment agreement’). The employment agreement contained no non-competition clause."[^singarayar-contract-instrument] For a multistate employer the takeaway is the inverse of the notice states: a Mississippi employer neither has to give a § 2872-style notice nor can rely on one to cure an overbroad clause. The enforceability of the assignment turns entirely on the contract language and the general limits on restraints, not on any statutory notice or disclosure formality. ## Who owns an invention by default in Mississippi? {#default-ownership} **Short answer.** The inventor, unless hired to invent. Absent a written assignment, the baseline under federal patent law — which governs who holds title to a patentable invention in Mississippi as elsewhere — is that rights belong to the employee who conceived it. The narrow exception is the employee hired to invent, whose resulting invention the employer may claim; short of that, the employer's default remedy is a shop right, a royalty-free license to use the invention, never title. No Mississippi appellate decision found in our review has articulated any of these doctrines, so the federal formulations are what a Mississippi court would most likely consult [^stanford-inventor][^dubilier-hired-to-invent]. Mississippi is unusually quiet here, even by no-statute standards. Our review found no decision of the Supreme Court of Mississippi or the Court of Appeals (created in 1993) articulating the hired-to-invent doctrine, the shop right, or any other employee-invention ownership rule as a matter of Mississippi common law. That silence does not leave a vacuum — it means the defaults come entirely from the federal baseline, and the openly predictive framing below is a forecast of what a Mississippi court would consult, not a report of what one has held. *Stanford v. Roche* anchors the default. The Supreme Court held that even the Bayh-Dole Act did not displace the long-standing rule that an invention belongs to its inventor, treating that premise as the baseline against which any assignment is measured [^stanford-inventor]. "Since 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor."[^stanford-inventor] Because ownership starts with the inventor, an employer's title is derivative — it exists only if and to the extent the employee assigned it. Any third-party interest must trace back to that inventor-grantor [^stanford-traceback]. "Thus, although others may acquire an interest in an invention, any such interest — as a general rule — must trace back to the inventor."[^stanford-traceback] The principal exception is the employee hired to invent. Under *United States v. Dubilier Condenser Corp.*, an employee engaged to make a particular invention who succeeds during the term of service must assign the resulting patent to the employer [^dubilier-hired-to-invent]. No Mississippi decision found in our review has adopted or applied that doctrine, so in Mississippi it stands as the analogous — and, as state common law, nonbinding — formulation a court would most likely follow. "One employed to make an invention, who succeeds, during his term of service, in accomplishing that task, is bound to assign to his employer any patent obtained."[^dubilier-hired-to-invent] Short of hired-to-invent, the employer's remedy is the equitable shop right — a non-exclusive license to use the invention, not ownership of it. *Dubilier* states the classic formulation [^dubilier-shop-right]. "Recognition of the nature of the act of invention also defines the limits of the so-called shop-right, which shortly stated, is that where a servant, during his hours of employment, working with his master's materials and appliances, conceives and perfects an invention for which he obtains a patent, he must accord his master a non-exclusive right to practice the invention."[^dubilier-shop-right] The nearest appellate elaboration of the shop right in this region comes from the federal court of appeals whose circuit includes Mississippi. In *Wommack v. Durham Pecan Co.*, the leading Fifth Circuit shop-right case — a Texas-origin patent appeal, so persuasive in-circuit color rather than Mississippi law — the court restated the standard test [^wommack-shop-right]. "As commonly stated, a shop right will be found where the employer shows that the invention was developed by his employee during the employer’s time or with the assistance of the employer’s property or labor."[^wommack-shop-right] A use right is not title. Because ownership therefore starts with the inventor and Mississippi has neither a statute nor a state case filling the gap, the dependable path for an employer is a written present-assignment (*hereby assigns*) clause that transfers legal title automatically on conception, rather than a future promise to assign that leaves the employer with a mere equitable claim. ## Are trailing-assignment (holdover) clauses enforceable in Mississippi? {#holdover-clause-limit} **Short answer.** Unsettled. Mississippi has no statute that could cap a trailing clause — there is no invention-assignment statute, and no restrictive-covenant statute of any kind, because covenant enforceability in Mississippi is entirely judge-made — and no Mississippi decision found in our review addresses a post-employment invention-assignment clause. Even the threshold question of whether a trailing assignment is a restraint subject to covenant reasonableness is undecided here. A Mississippi court asked to police an aggressive holdover would most likely reach for its judge-made covenant framework — enforce to the extent reasonable, in service of a legitimate business interest — but that is a prediction from an untested analogy, not a holding [^redd-enforce-to-extent-reasonable][^singarayar-bifurcated]. Two layers of silence define the Mississippi picture. First, there is no statute anywhere in the frame: unlike states whose codes impose a general restraint-of-trade rule that a court might stretch to reach an assignment clause, Mississippi's restrictive-covenant law is pure common law, and the only restraint-of-trade chapter in the code — Title 75, chapter 21 — is antitrust, with no application to employment IP clauses. Second, there is no case: our review found no Mississippi decision applying any standard to an invention-holdover clause, and no Mississippi court has said whether such a clause even counts as a restraint that covenant doctrine reaches, as opposed to a pure assignment of property outside that doctrine. What Mississippi does supply is a judge-made reasonableness-and-partial-enforcement framework for restrictive covenants, anchored in *Redd Pest Control Co. v. Heatherly*. There the Supreme Court of Mississippi confronted an overbroad employee covenant and, rather than voiding it, enforced it to the extent of its reasonable territory [^redd-enforce-to-extent-reasonable]. "There is no sound reason why the contract should not be enforced to the extent that it is reasonable since it protects a legitimate business interest."[^redd-enforce-to-extent-reasonable] The rationale of that framework is interest-protection. *Redd Pest Control* grounded enforcement in the employer's legitimate need to protect its business from the peculiar advantages a former employee carries away [^redd-customer-relationships]. "The volume of cases involving employee restraints based on customer relationships indicates quite clearly that business enterprises recognize the desirability, even necessity, of protecting the business from loss of customers by the activities of former employees who have peculiar knowledge of and relationships with the employer’s customers."[^redd-customer-relationships] The closest Mississippi-native fact pattern is *American Elec., a Div. of FL Industries v. Singarayar* again. An engineer who had signed an invention-assignment and nondisclosure agreement left for a competitor; the trial court restrained his use of the employer's trade secrets while leaving him free to take the new job, and the Supreme Court of Mississippi declined interlocutory review of that preliminary order [^singarayar-bifurcated]. "Thereafter, on March 25, 1988, the Circuit Court entered an order in essence restraining Singarayar, preliminary to disposition of the action on its merits, from disclosure or other use of American Electric's trade secrets and other proprietary information and ordering that Singarayar return to American Electric all property of American Electric of which he had custody."[^singarayar-bifurcated] Read *Singarayar* for what it is: the bifurcated relief — trade secrets protected, new employment not enjoined — was the trial court's preliminary call, and the Supreme Court left it in place solely because the dispute did not warrant an interlocutory appeal. It is an illustration of how Mississippi's one invention-agreement dispute was actually litigated, not a merits precedent on what an assignment or holdover clause may reach. Extending *Redd Pest Control* to a trailing invention assignment is therefore a prediction, not a holding. If a Mississippi court treats a holdover clause as a restraint, the enforce-to-the-extent-reasonable approach points toward narrowing an overbroad trailer rather than voiding it outright — but only where the clause protects a legitimate business interest such as the employer's confidential information, and no Mississippi decision found in our review has taken even that first step. If the court instead treats the clause as a pure property assignment outside covenant doctrine, no Mississippi authority found in our review says what limit, if any, applies. Drafting lore that holdover clauses beyond a year face heightened skepticism has no Mississippi authority behind it; the honest answer is that the question is open at every level. > [!NOTE] > **Practice note.** > > Mississippi gives an invention-assignment clause no statutory safe harbor and no statutory ceiling, and no Mississippi appellate decision found in our review has construed one on the merits, so the words of the contract do all the work — ownership starts with the inventor, and an employer's rights are only as good as the language that transfers them, which is why present-assignment (*hereby assigns*) wording that passes title automatically is safer than a bare promise to assign later [^stanford-traceback-practice]. Keep any trailing or holdover assignment narrow, short, and tied to work rooted in the employment or the employer's confidential information — no Mississippi authority found in our review addresses such clauses, and the state's judge-made covenant framework enforces a restraint only to the extent it is reasonable and protects a legitimate business interest, with no statute to save an overbroad term [^redd-enforce-to-extent-reasonable]. [^about]: By Steven Obiajulu, J.D. Published by [openagreements.org](https://openagreements.org). Last reviewed 2026-07-03. License: CC BY 4.0. Steven Obiajulu, J.D. is admitted in New York, not Mississippi. This article synthesizes Mississippi primary law and is not legal advice from a Mississippi-admitted attorney. This article is for informational purposes only and does not create an attorney-client relationship. CC BY 4.0. Cite as Steven Obiajulu, *Employee Invention Assignment in Mississippi*, OpenAgreements (last updated July 3, 2026), https://openagreements.org/practice-guides/invention-assignment/us/mississippi. [^singarayar-agreement]: **American Elec., a Div. of FL Industries v. Singarayar** — "On that date he signed an ‘Agreement for Assignment of Inventions and Covenant Against Disclosure’ (hereinafter ‘employment agreement’). The employment agreement contained no non-competition clause." *American Elec., a Div. of FL Industries v. Singarayar, 530 So. 2d 1319 (Miss. 1988).* [^stanford-baseline]: **Bd. of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Systems** — "Since 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor." *Bd. of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Sys., Inc., 563 U.S. 776 (2011).* [^singarayar-contract-instrument]: **American Elec., a Div. of FL Industries v. Singarayar** — "On that date he signed an ‘Agreement for Assignment of Inventions and Covenant Against Disclosure’ (hereinafter ‘employment agreement’). The employment agreement contained no non-competition clause." *American Elec., a Div. of FL Industries v. Singarayar, 530 So. 2d 1319 (Miss. 1988).* [^stanford-inventor]: **Bd. of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Systems** — "Since 1790, the patent law has operated on the premise that rights in an invention belong to the inventor." *Bd. of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Sys., Inc., 563 U.S. 776 (2011).* [^dubilier-hired-to-invent]: **United States v. Dubilier Condenser Corp.** — "One employed to make an invention, who succeeds, during his term of service, in accomplishing that task, is bound to assign to his employer any patent obtained." *United States v. Dubilier Condenser Corp., 289 U.S. 178 (1933).* [^stanford-traceback]: **Bd. of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Systems** — "Thus, although others may acquire an interest in an invention, any such interest — as a general rule — must trace back to the inventor." *Bd. of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Sys., Inc., 563 U.S. 776 (2011).* [^dubilier-shop-right]: **United States v. Dubilier Condenser Corp.** — "Recognition of the nature of the act of invention also defines the limits of the so-called shop-right, which shortly stated, is that where a servant, during his hours of employment, working with his master's materials and appliances, conceives and perfects an invention for which he obtains a patent, he must accord his master a non-exclusive right to practice the invention." *United States v. Dubilier Condenser Corp., 289 U.S. 178 (1933).* [^wommack-shop-right]: **Wommack v. Durham Pecan Co.** — "As commonly stated, a shop right will be found where the employer shows that the invention was developed by his employee during the employer’s time or with the assistance of the employer’s property or labor." *Wommack v. Durham Pecan Co., 715 F.2d 962 (5th Cir. 1983).* [^redd-enforce-to-extent-reasonable]: **Redd Pest Control Co. v. Heatherly** — "There is no sound reason why the contract should not be enforced to the extent that it is reasonable since it protects a legitimate business interest." *Redd Pest Control Co. v. Heatherly, 248 Miss. 34, 157 So. 2d 133 (Miss. 1963).* [^singarayar-bifurcated]: **American Elec., a Div. of FL Industries v. Singarayar** — "Thereafter, on March 25, 1988, the Circuit Court entered an order in essence restraining Singarayar, preliminary to disposition of the action on its merits, from disclosure or other use of American Electric's trade secrets and other proprietary information and ordering that Singarayar return to American Electric all property of American Electric of which he had custody." *American Elec., a Div. of FL Industries v. Singarayar, 530 So. 2d 1319 (Miss. 1988).* [^redd-customer-relationships]: **Redd Pest Control Co. v. Heatherly** — "The volume of cases involving employee restraints based on customer relationships indicates quite clearly that business enterprises recognize the desirability, even necessity, of protecting the business from loss of customers by the activities of former employees who have peculiar knowledge of and relationships with the employer’s customers." *Redd Pest Control Co. v. Heatherly, 248 Miss. 34, 157 So. 2d 133 (Miss. 1963).* [^stanford-traceback-practice]: **Bd. of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Systems** — "Thus, although others may acquire an interest in an invention, any such interest — as a general rule — must trace back to the inventor." *Bd. of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior Univ. v. Roche Molecular Sys., Inc., 563 U.S. 776 (2011).*