Italy

Italian law does not provide a unified regulation of employee’ creations, but rather an extensive set of different rules. With the sole exception of university researchers’ creations (regulated under art. 65 of the Industrial Property Code), a common principle of the specific rules concerning intellectual property right is that when the employee is hired to create, the employer hold title on such creations. This scheme has been commonly perceived as the result of a conflict between the employee, who should hold title for being the author, and the employer who should hold title for the reason they incur the risk of the investment and should not bear the transaction costs of an ex post negotiations. Together with a detailed discussion on the provision involved, in this work I suggest to regard the employer not as a mere economical counterpart of the author but as an essential driver of the complex machinery of innovation.