Record 163 mil. yen awarded to Hitachi inventor in patent suit

It's interesting what's happening in some of these Japanese cases. Apparently under Japanese patent law, employees are entitled to reasonable compensation (a percentage of profits) for their inventions, when they are in an arrangement requiring them to turn over all patents to their employer...

One has received a judgment for ￥163 million, and another (mentioned at the bottom of the article) has just received one for ￥20 billion.

Is there such an imbalance of bargaining power between companies and employees that this is justified? Can't employees bargain for this as part of their compensation from the outset? In the U.S., courts will generally not intervene to decide for the parties how much their services are worth.

This may seem just when you think about it, but consider all the engineers that Hitachi employs... It may be that they count on having a few gems in order to pay all the others. There are a lot of considerations... Quite interesting though.