Italy has historically lagged behind other European nations in obtaining patents on its inventions. In 2000, for example, it got just 3.3% of patents granted by the European Patent Office (Munich), compared with 7.7% for France and 19.6% for Germany. Although this is partly attributable to poor R&D investment by Italian industry, university researchers have also tended to marginalize applied research and dismiss commercial exploitation of inventions, preferring to publish rather than patent. More recently, patent offices and industry liaison offices have been set up (for instance, at Politecnico di Milano, Università di Bologna, and Università “La Sapienza” in Rome), but overall the efficiency of Italian technology transfer is among the poorest in Europe (Nature Biotechnol. 18, 605–608, 2000).
Presuming that many Italian inventions are unexploited due to bureaucracy in university administrations, the new center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi has decided to accelerate patenting of research by providing direct incentives to public researchers, with the slogan “inventions to the inventors.” The law was spearheaded by the Minister for Economy and Finance, Giulio Tremonti, in collaboration with the Minister for University and Scientific Research, Letizia Moratti, and was strongly supported by the whole Cabinet, which included the reform in its program for the first 100 days of government. The legislation proposes that inventors should be sole owners of their inventions, with the right to sell or license the patent to whomever they want; in return, inventors are responsible for patenting fees (an expense previously borne by universities). Although universities and public research centers do retain a limited right to a share of revenues deriving from commercial exploitation of inventions, the threshold set out by the new rules is far too low to be cost-effective. This contrasts with the present process, where universities have much more control and can impose a “rights premium” on inventors. Under the new law, however, an inventor's share cannot drop under 50% and can grow up to as much as 70% (unless the university uses internal regulations to tie down the researcher).
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