Often guitar companies design pickups in house and use engineers to design and work on projects. At times the owner of the company will use his name as the inventor even though they didn’t design the pickup. Often times a pickup design may be used with no patent on the design and later be patented by some other company that applied for it. Often a company will obtain a design from an outsider and patent it themselves.

There are several guitar pickup designs with no patent and it seems the pickups are in public domain. Often a patent on a pickup will run out in 7 years depending on the type patent issued.