Clause 8.—(CROWN USE OF PATENTED INVENTIONS AND REGISTERED DESIGNS.) (Hansard, 20 October 1953)

§ The Attorney-General

I beg to move, in page 10, line 13, at the end, to insert: (5) Where in accordance with the said provisions a licensee would apart from this section be entitled to recover from a patentee or registered proprietor an amount representing a part of payments required under those provisions to be made by a Government department, and by reasons of subsection (2) of this section the claim of the patentee or registered proprietor to those payments is wholly or partly barred, then so far as the claim of the licensee is not itself barred by that subsection he shall be entitled to recover that amount as follows, that is to say,—

(a) if the claim of the patentee or registered proprietor is wholly barred, the licensee shall be entitled to recover that amount from the Government department in question;
(b) if the claim of the patentee or registered proprietor is partly barred, the right of the licensee to recover from him shall 1849 abate accordingly and the licensee shall be entitled to recover the balance of the amount from the Government department.

As this is a matter concerned with the recovery of money from Government Departments it had to be left out of the Bill and dealt with as a matter of Privilege. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce it by this means. I think it can be explained very shortly. It is the kind of case in which there is a German patent, and a licence is granted to a non-alien and there is user of it by a Government Department. As I am informed, the normal course of business would be for the Department, under the Patents Act, 1949, Section 47 (4), to pay the owner of the patent, leaving the licensee to recover his share, or, in cases of dispute, what may be decided by the court.

Subsection (2) has entitled the former to claim, and it is obviously desirable that the non-enemy licensee should not be prejudiced. Subsection (5), therefore, will allow him to recover direct from the Department the sum which he would normally have recovered from the owner, who, in that case, would, in his turn, have recovered from the Department. It is a straightforward provision, which is designed to meet the very type of case which the hon. and learned Gentleman has in mind, in which, otherwise, non-Germans might be penalised.