On 20 November 2017 the Supreme Court issued an important judgement in a dispute where Studio Sena and Tarchini assisted an inventor who had realised numerous and important inventions whilst, employed by an Italian company belonging to a multinational group, he occupied the position of managing director (Supreme Court 27500/2017, President Vittorio Ragonesi, Reporting Judge Carlo De Chiara – attached hereto). The Supreme Court confirmed that the inventor employee was entitled to a fair premium for the inventions patented by the company, dismissing the multitude of arguments based on which the latter had tried to escape from his committments pursuant to art. 64 of the intellectual property code. It’s worth noting in particular that, confirming the decisions in the first and second degrees of the proceedings, the Supreme Court has definitively denied the employer to whom the fair premium has been requested, the right to contest, both by way of defense and through an action, the validity of the patents owned by him. The Supreme Court, besides reiterating that the principle that a dispute advanced as a procedural defense would not however suffice to subtract the employer from the obligation to pay a fair premium, has affirmed that the right by the latter to institute a nullity proceedings is not allowed by the law, since art. 122 of the IP Code (like the former art. 78 of the patent law), sees the owner only as ‘opposer’ in the proceedings for validity of the patent.
The Supreme Court has moreover emphasized that the exclusion of patent owner from the group of subjects entitled to institute nullity proceedings stems from the general prohibition to come contra factum proprium.