A special type of "smart weapon": the patent

(To Danilo Mancinone)
26/03/20

In this unhappy period in which the hashtag dominates #I stay at home, fortunately shared and respected by most, launched to fight the Covid-19 emergency, I am able to dedicate myself with greater intensity and frequency to one of my passions: reading. Not the professional one, already of its constant, more complex and in continuous evolution, but the one chosen for simple pleasure, for intellectual curiosity and, more often than not, managed by me randomly. On the other hand, in my opinion, reading a book that I have chosen, or that maybe it was recommended to me by a dear friend, is always the best way to "go out", staying comfortably at home.

And just by reading1, I discovered an unusual person who really existed: Francesco Antonio Broccu, Tziu Brocu in Sardinian. Profession: inventor.

Born in Sardinia, towards the end of 1700 (presumably in 1797), in the Barbagia of Belvì, son of Battista and Angelica Poddi, already in childhood he gave vent to his talent, making wooden toys and other tools. House and shop in Gadoni, via Coa 'e muru, number 10, which no longer exist.

It is said that he never left his native country, where he worked exclusively for his community, even at an administrative level, and for which he made numerous artifacts.
To cite just a few examples, thanks to his multidisciplinary skills over the years he built a bit of everything: a pendulum clock that had as a dial a panel of the front door of his home (also produced by precision gears and hands , complete with a ringtone!), an exceptionally well-made wooden crucifix, various wheel models, a semi-automatic frame, an organ, a bell for the convent of the Friars Minor, a particular musical instrument, with a powerful sound, to announce the rites of Holy Week and an infinite number of toys conceived with natural materials present in Sardinia, such as the ferula, the cork, the reeds.

As a mechanics enthusiast, he also made significant changes - which today we would perhaps call "hybrids" - to a mill owned by him, strengthening it with a wooden turbine with vertical axis and animal traction and, always in the same period, he built another one, equipped of a hydraulic steering wheel of larger dimensions than the common ones, thus obtaining significantly higher than average performance.

He became an iron craftsman and his specialty was undoubtedly weapons, which found a good market and therefore guaranteed him sufficient economic income.

The talents of the brilliant inventor and craftsman of great dexterity were therefore undoubted, at least locally. His passion for mechanics and weapons led him to create in 1833 several innovative models of "revolver" (what a funny name, right?): A four-shot drum pistol, a four-barrel pistol and a two barrels and, a few years later, also an over-and-under shotgun, today all prototypes preserved in private collections of passionate Sardinians.

However, just three years after his first "revolver", a historical event happened in the United States of America: a young sailor, Samuel, from Hartford, Connecticut, a wandering traveler, started his entrepreneurial activity in the arms sector. That Samuel, the sailor, had a surname Colt and patented the gun revolver. It was February 25, 1836.

The American, with great skills in mechanics so as to direct the subsequent development of the arms industries in the United States, as a forward-looking entrepreneur, once the patent was registered and marketed on behalf of his company Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company2, also contributed to the Expedition of the Thousand of Garibaldi with the "gift" of revolvers and carbines3.

Some of the readers will ask: why this story?

To put it to Tex4: the American fired first, shooting the town's ingenious blacksmith for life on the Flumendosa River and relegating him to the long list of mocked inventors ...

In reality, it was not a real duel but a challenge at a distance, it seems that the one did not know about the other.
The sailor Samuel Colt won, who was quicker to patent the weapon that would revolutionize the nineteenth century, the most famous of the western epic: the drum gun.

To be honest, the real answer to the question is because history teaches us that the patent serves to protect and enhance ideas. So much so that in the world there are real patent wars, in which the belligerents who fight with stamped papers and long judicial cases are often (or almost exclusively) the great giants of the world high tech or biotechnologies that use these "weapons" (patents, in fact) to grab rights and market shares.

And according to some, the unarmed victims, without legal protection and poorly capitalized, who fall to the ground are often the innovative startups, run by entrepreneurs with a new one participants' vision who live in constant fear that "these evil giants or other evil goblins will send them into bankruptcy with senseless causes", just to quote Vivek Wadhwa, who before being a prestigious Business Week columnist was a successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and researcher at Duke University.

But let's proceed step by step.

A patent protects the function, operation or structure of a certain invention.
The patent5 is a title by virtue of which the holder is granted a temporary monopoly of exploitation of an invention, for a limited period of time, consisting of the exclusive right to make it, dispose of it and make a commercial use of it, prohibiting such activities to other unauthorized subjects. A patent does not grant the owner an authorization for the free use of the invention covered by the patent, but only the right to exclude other subjects from using it.

The exclusive right conferred by the patent is effective only within the state that issued it (principle of territoriality). Only technological innovations with industrial application, which present themselves as new, original and concrete solutions to a technical problem, can be patented.

The following can be patented:

  • industrial inventions;
  • utility models;
  • the new plant varieties.

To be protected by the patent, the invention must possess and maintain the following characteristics:

  • Announcements;
  • mass production;
  • non-intuitiveness;
  • claimability.

As an alternative to patenting, a company that intends to protect its own invention may:

  • make it public, through a "defensive" publication, thus ensuring that no one else can patent it;
  • keep the invention secret, resorting to industrial secrecy, governed by art. 98 of the ICC, according to which corporate information and technical-industrial experiences, including commercial ones, subject to the legitimate control of the holder, are subject to protection.

Since protecting a patent abroad is very expensive, it is advisable to carefully select the countries in which to apply for such protection, checking a series of conditions, including: the place of manufacture of the product, where it will be marketed, what are the main markets for similar products, where the main competitors are located, what are the costs necessary to patent and what will be the procedural difficulties to protect a patent in a given country.

Today the value of many companies is 90% made up of so-called intangible assets (intangible assets), consisting mostly of industrial property rights. With patent protection it is possible to prevent others from patenting identical or similar inventions and also to violate the rights of use (production and marketing) covered by the patent. Owning a "strong" patent provides concrete possibilities for success in legal action against those who copy the protected invention. By using the patent not only to have an exclusive right on the market, but also as a normal property or asset, it is possible to obtain economic and competitive advantages: in practice a patent determines a concrete enrichment of a company, as well as increasing its position as strength on the market. In Italy we still think in terms of the quantity of applications filed, while we should aim at the quality of the deposits to restart the industrial sector.

In addition, a good patent portfolio can be perceived by business partners, investors, shareholders and customers as a demonstration of the company's high level of quality, specialization and technological capacity, raising its positive image. To encourage these virtuous dynamics, the State provides specific tools and measures for Italian companies6.
Therefore, by using the patent not only to have an exclusive right on the market, but also as a normal property or property, it is possible to obtain the following economic and competitive advantages:

  • additional profits deriving from the granting of user licenses or the granting of the patent;
  • higher profits or returns on investments in research and development (R&D);
  • access to technology through cross-licensing;
  • access to new markets;
  • greater possibilities of obtaining financial contributions from intermediaries for the ownership of an intangible asset;
  • Patent Box: is the tax exemption for income deriving from the exploitation of intellectual works.

Ah, I almost forgot ... Part of the objects made by the late Sardinian genius were inherited first by his granddaughter, then donated by the latter to the parish priest of the town in 1932, who finished the job as a priest in Gadoni and moved to his home in Oristano, where he set up a sort of private museum with these "personalized inventions".

However, when the religious died, they were sold by relatives to an unknown American tourist ...

1 Perhaps not everyone knows that in Sardinia ... Curiosities, unpublished stories, mysteries, anecdotes and unknown places of an ancestral island by Gianmichele Lisai, Rome, Newton Compton editori srl, 2016.
2 Today Colt's Manufacturing Company, LLC. https://www.colt.com
3 Le Colt di Garibaldi by Enrico Arrigoni, Milan, Il grifo, 2000.
4 The most famous and beloved ranger of the comics, born from the pen of Gianluigi Bonelli and the pencil of the Sardinian Aurelio Galleppini, the legendary Galep.
5 For more information: https://uibm.mise.gov.it/index.php/it/brevetti
6 https://uibm.mise.gov.it/index.php/it/nuovi-bandi-per-la-valorizzazione-...