The draft law amending the Industrial Property Code has been definitively approved.
The reform pursues the strengthening of the competitiveness of the country’s economic system, the protection of industrial property and the administrative simplification and digitalisation of procedures.
The measure, among the novelties introduced, provides:
- with the new text of Article 65, that also in Italy, as in the rest of the main western countries, the patent originating from research carried out by researchers at universities, public research organisations, and institutes for hospitalisation and care of a scientific nature shall be the property of the structure, in order to make it easier to transfer technology and also to exploit inventions, as well as dictating the regulation of inventions that are generated by research activities financed by companies, with a view to maximising the flexibility of relations between these and university structures, on the basis of criteria that will be set within 60 days by the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy in agreement with the Ministry of Universities and Research;
- the possibility of obtaining ad hoc protection for designs and models presented at trade fairs, both national and international;
- the focus on the fight against counterfeiting, with the possibility of seizing counterfeit products displayed at trade fairs;
- the strengthening of the system of safeguards to protect geographical indications, a heritage of fundamental importance for Italy, with the extension of the hypotheses in which it is possible to initiate opposition proceedings against imitative trademarks of PDOs.