Italy abolished the university researcher’s “professor’s privilege” for the second time this century when Law No. 102/2023 entered into force on 23 August 2023, amending Article 65 of the Italian Industrial Property Code (Codice della Proprieta Industriale). Where the prior rule made the individual researcher the default owner of a patentable invention made in the course of university or public-research employment, the revised Article 65 now assigns those rights to the institution the researcher is affiliated with. Sweden’s lararundantaget is the clearest large-scale surviving example of professor’s privilege in Europe (see CASRAI’s guide to how KTH, Chalmers, and Karolinska Institutet operate under it) — Italy’s 2023 reform is the direct counterpoint: a major European research system moving the other direction, from individual ownership back to institutional ownership. This guide covers what actually changed, the new disclosure-and-filing mechanism, and what remains genuinely unverified or contract-dependent.
What Law No. 102/2023 changed
Before the reform, Article 65 of the IP Code gave university and public-research-institution employees an exception to Italy’s general employee-invention rule: unlike most employed inventors, whose employer typically holds rights to work-related inventions, a researcher’s patentable invention belonged to the researcher personally, not the institution. This is the same structural pattern CASRAI’s Professor’s Privilege dictionary entry describes generically — an inventor-ownership default carved out specifically for academic researchers.
Law No. 102/2023 reverses that default. The revised Article 65 provides that rights to an invention made by a researcher employed by a university or public research institution belong to the institution itself, with the researcher retaining only the personal, non-transferable right to be named and recognized as the inventor — the same moral-rights-style distinction between inventorship and ownership that appears throughout patent law generally (see CASRAI’s Invention entry and its guide to correcting inventorship on an issued patent). Multiple Italian and international law firms that track the reform — including Bird & Bird, Portolano Cavallo, and Osborne Clarke — describe this specifically as bringing Italy’s rule in line with the institutional-ownership norm already used by most other Western research systems, the same norm the United States codified for federally funded inventions in the Bayh-Dole Act.
The new disclosure-and-filing procedure
The reformed Article 65 does not simply hand institutions ownership outright; it builds in a disclosure step similar in structure, though not identical in mechanics, to the invention-disclosure process CASRAI covers generally in its guide to what researchers submit to a TTO, and why timing matters. Under the new procedure:
- The researcher must communicate the invention to their university or research institution.
- The institution then has six months to file a patent application, or to notify the researcher that it is not interested in pursuing one.
- If the institution fails to act within that window, or affirmatively declines, the researcher may file the patent application independently, in their own name.
Some legal-industry summaries of the reform describe this six-month window as extendable by a further period in specific circumstances; that detail varies across secondary sources and is worth confirming directly against the current statutory text (or with Italian patent counsel) before relying on it for a live disclosure timeline, rather than treating it as settled here.
Third-party-funded and commissioned research
Article 65 does not fully displace contract. Where an invention arises from research funded or commissioned by a third party — a company sponsoring a university lab, for example — ownership is governed by the contractual agreement between the parties, not by the statutory default alone. Guidelines adopted on 26 September 2023 (following the law’s entry into force) direct the contracting parties to explicitly define ownership of the results of commissioned research in the agreement itself, while leaving inventor compensation terms open to negotiation rather than fixing a statutory royalty percentage. For a research administrator, this makes the underlying sponsored-research or collaboration agreement, not the statute, the operative document for any given commissioned project — consistent with how CASRAI’s guide to the technology transfer process treats invention ownership as something a specific agreement should always confirm explicitly rather than assume from a jurisdiction’s general default.
What the reform does not clearly resolve
Two practical questions are not settled by the sources reviewed for this guide, and should not be treated as resolved:
- Transition/grandfathering. Available legal-firm analyses of Law No. 102/2023 do not describe an explicit grandfather clause carving out inventions conceived before the 23 August 2023 entry-into-force date. Whether pre-reform inventions remain under the old researcher-ownership rule, or fall under institutional ownership if disclosed after that date, is a live implementation question institutions and researchers should confirm with counsel rather than assume either way.
- Inventor remuneration formula. The statute does not fix a mandatory royalty share for the inventor-researcher (unlike some national patent systems that set a statutory employee-inventor compensation formula). Compensation is left to institutional policy and, for commissioned work, to contract — meaning the actual share a researcher receives can vary by institution.
Why this is a reversal, not a first move
Italy’s position on university invention ownership has not been static this century. Cross-referenced legal-industry and academic-innovation-policy coverage describes Italy adopting institutional ownership in an earlier reform, then reversing to a form of professor’s privilege, before Law No. 102/2023 abolished that privilege again in 2023. That back-and-forth history is itself a useful caution for research administrators: a jurisdiction’s current invention-ownership default is a snapshot, not a permanent feature, and should be re-confirmed against the current statute before it is relied on in a policy document or collaboration agreement, rather than assumed static from a prior year’s guide or training material.
How Italy now compares to other systems
| System | Default invention owner | Status as of this writing |
|---|---|---|
| Italy (post Law No. 102/2023) | Employing university or public research institution | Institutional ownership since 23 August 2023 |
| United States (federally funded research) | Employing institution elects title, subject to government march-in rights | Institutional ownership since the Bayh-Dole Act (1980) |
| Germany | Employing institution | Institutional ownership since a 2002 reform of the Hochschullehrerprivileg |
| Sweden | Individual researcher (lararundantaget) | Professor’s privilege still in effect — see CASRAI’s Sweden TTO model guide |
Italy’s 2023 reform leaves Sweden increasingly isolated among major European research systems as a still-live professor’s-privilege jurisdiction, reinforcing the point made in CASRAI’s Sweden guide: most comparable countries have already moved to institutional ownership, which is precisely why Sweden’s arrangement is worth documenting operationally rather than assuming it will persist unchanged.
What this means for research administrators and TTOs
For a technology transfer office at an Italian university or public research institution, the reform converts what was previously a voluntary, negotiated relationship with individual inventors into something closer to the disclosure-and-title-election model CASRAI describes generally for U.S. institutions — with a shorter, statute-fixed decision window (six months) than the informal norms that often surrounded the pre-reform researcher-ownership default. For a research administrator negotiating a cross-border collaboration involving an Italian co-investigator, the practical consequence mirrors the caution in CASRAI’s Sweden guide about Bayh-Dole-versus-professor’s-privilege collaborations: confirm which default currently applies, and don’t assume it is the one that applied when a template agreement or policy document was last written, since Italy’s own history shows this default has changed more than once.
Frequently asked questions
When did Law No. 102/2023 take effect?
It entered into force on 23 August 2023, per multiple corroborating legal-industry summaries of the Italian IP Code reform.
Does the reform apply retroactively to inventions made before August 2023?
This is not clearly addressed in the available secondary-source legal analysis reviewed for this guide. Treat retroactivity/transition treatment as an open question to confirm directly with Italian patent counsel or the current statutory text, not something this guide can state definitively.
What happens if the university doesn’t act within the six-month window?
The researcher may file the patent application independently, in their own name, per the disclosure procedure built into the revised Article 65.
Does Law No. 102/2023 apply only to universities, or to public research institutions generally?
The reform is framed around researchers employed by universities and public research institutions, consistent with how the prior professor’s-privilege rule was scoped — the operative test is the employment relationship, not the institution type specifically.
How does Italy’s reform compare to Sweden’s professor’s privilege?
They now sit at opposite ends of the same spectrum: Italy’s Law No. 102/2023 shifted default ownership from the researcher to the institution, while Sweden’s lararundantaget continues to leave ownership with the individual researcher by default. See CASRAI’s Sweden Professor’s Privilege TTO Model guide for how Swedish universities operate around that still-live rule.
For the general legal concept and how it compares across jurisdictions, see CASRAI’s Professor’s Privilege dictionary entry. For the broader technology transfer landscape, see the Technology Transfer pillar page.
