I assume you mean that your brother is listed as a co-inventor and that Microsoft is the owner of the patent right. See <a href="http://www.yale.edu/ocr/pfg/guidelines/patent/inventor_owner.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.yale.edu/ocr/pfg/guidelines/patent/inventor_owner...</a> for details of the differences.<p>This has been around for a long time. Indeed, there's a roughly similar story in Feynman's account titled "I Want My Dollar!":<p>> What had happened was, during the war, at Los Alamos, there was a very nice fella in charge of the patent office for the government, named Captain Smith. Smith sent around a notice to everybody that said something like, "We in the patent office would like to patent every idea you have for the United States government, for which you are working now. Any idea you have on nuclear energy or its application that you may think everybody knows about, everybody doesn't know about: Just come to my office and tell me the idea."<p>So Feynman pointed out to Smith there are a bunch of ideas and it's crazy to tell them all. He gives four examples, and leaves.<p>> About three months later, Smith calls me in the office and says, "Feynman, the submarine has already been taken. But the other three are yours."<p>> ... Anyway, Smith told me to sign some papers for the three ideas I was giving to the government to patent. Now, it's some dopey legal thing, but when you give the patent to the government, the document you sign is not a legal document unless there's some exchange, so the paper I signed said, "For the sum of one dollar, I, Richard P. Feynman, give this idea to the government . . ."<p>The rest of the story is about the $1, and how the other scientists, once they found how easy it was to get a dollar, started sending patent ideas.