Revision of the Industrial Property Code: lights and shadows of the bill approved by the CdM
The Council of Ministers approved on 6 April a bill aimed at amending various provisions of the Industrial Property Code. The text will be examined by Parliament in the next few days (where it could already be approved by the Commission in the deliberative session, without the need for passages in the classroom that could make it postpone to the next legislature), but already now some significant potential innovations must be reported, concerning the administrative simplification and, above all, the digitization of procedures.
Significant – even if it can be perfected – is also the return to universities (public and private) and other public research bodies of the patrimonial rights on the inventions made by their employees; far less impactful (and even potentially dangerous) is the provision of interim protection for designs“official or officially recognized” international exhibits at the Fair, which recovers an institution canceled by the 2010 reform. There is also no intervention, which was also hypothesized to be included in this text, which leads to systematic coherence – and, even before that, makes concretely applicable – the compulsory license in the event of a national health emergency, introduced last year under the pressure of the (unfounded) controversies against the patent system that developed after the launch of anti-Covid vaccines (which thanks to the patent system and incentives for the enterprises it realizes have arrived in record time).
