With the judgment no. 4131 of 18 February 2025, the Court of Cassation she returned to the topic of exploitation of co-owned patent.
The Supreme Court clarifies that, in the absence of agreements between the parties, the single joint owner does not have the power to exploit the patent, neither indirectly (through a license) nor directly (through one's own business activity).
In essence, the Supreme Court holds the model of disjointed individual enjoyment, outlined in art. 1102 of the Civil Code, incompatible with the function of the patent as a tool to control access to the invention market.
The ruling is particularly relevant because it intervenes, in substantially shareable terms, on a topic that has long remained on the margins of jurisprudential and doctrinal debate, and yet is crucial in the patent law system and in the reality of innovative companies in the technological field.
The indirect implications of the decision are also important:
1. In a system that starts from the principle that the exploitation of the patent in joint ownership requires the agreement of the joint owners, the type of contracts that can be used to shape the different ways of exploiting the common patent takes on crucial importance and yet it poses delicate and difficult to solve problems, also due to the lack of an express discipline.
2. The reaffirmation of the centrality of the exclusive right within of the relationships between the joint owners of the patent could have important consequences for the purpose of solving the problem, to a certain extent similar, which has always been posed by the co-ownership of the trademark (a topic on which the state of the debate, especially in jurisprudence, is still very unsatisfactory).
For those interested in learning more about these topics, we recommend the monograph by Prof. Avv. Paolo Cuomo, which – in addition to anticipating the solutions now accepted by the Court of Cassation – analyses in depth the cases and discipline of the main agreements for the exploitation of the patent in joint ownership: P. Cuomo, La co-ownership of the patent between cooperation and competition, Giappichelli, 2020.
