The Bayh-Dole Act establishes the rights to inventions developed with federal funds.

(g) Waiver of Rights to Inventions.

As a result, Mr. Lemelson is asserting his rights to inventions that are decades old but did not receive patents until the last year or so.

That patent has been criticized in the high-technology industry as part of a trend that extends property rights to inventions and ideas that critics say do not merit the protection and that squelch innovation.

Still, Patty Smith, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com, said the company would continue to enforce a noncompete and confidentiality agreement that the employees had signed upon being hired, which also relates to issues like employees' rights to inventions.

By the 1970s, some federal agencies had started to use "Institutional Patent Agreements" to allow grantee companies or institutions to retain rights to inventions made with federal funding, but such agreements were not regularly used.

Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 gives federal contractors, grantees, and cooperative agreement funding recipients the option to retain ownership rights to inventions they create as part of a federally sponsored research project and profit from commercializing them.

Bayh argued that "a federal contractor's ownership rights to inventions covered by the Bayh-Dole Act cannot be terminated unilaterally by an individual inventor through a separate agreement purporting to assign the inventor's rights to a third party."