Starting point for additional remuneration for employee inventors
By its decision of 1 April 2022, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled on the point from which time runs, for limitation purposes, in a claim for additional remuneration in respect of inventions de mission.
L’affaire soumise à la Cour d’appel de Paris soulevait la question de la prescription à l’égard de 11 inventions de salarié unexploited inventions made between 1999 and 2015 et à l’égard d’inventions exploitées issues d’un partenariat de recherches achevé en 2014. Both categories of invention were held to be time-barred. As regards unexploited inventions, in accordance withArticle 2224 of the French Civil Code, the five-year limitation period was held to run from the date of the latest patent filing, namely 2007, since by that date the employee could not have been unaware of her right to additional remuneration. As regards exploited inventions, which were connected to the research partnership, in accordance withArticle L. 3245-1 of the French Labour Code, the three-year limitation period was held to run from the date on which the claim became ascertainable, namely December 2014, when the partnership came to an end.
It should be recalled that the question of when time starts to run in a claim for additional remuneration for inventeurs salariés was reformed by the Act of 17 June 2008, which amended Article 2224 of the Civil Code, to which the former Article L. 3245-1 of the Labour Code referred. Before 2008, time could not begin to run so long as the claim was neither ascertained nor certain. Since then, time runs from the date on which the employee “ a connu ou aurait dû connaître ” the facts enabling him or her to bring the claim. As to the length of the period, previously ten or thirty years, the same 2008 Act set it at five years — subsequently reduced to three years for inventions de salariés by the Act of 14 June 2013, amending Article L. 3245-1 of the Labour Code.
L’arrêt commenté comporte deux enseignements.
First, the Court applies the “floating” starting point provided for by Article 2224 of the Civil Code, taken up in Article L. 3245-1 of the Labour Code, to the limitation of an employee’s remuneration claim. Under those provisions, time begins to run from the moment the employee “knew or ought to have known” the facts enabling him or her to exercise the right. The transitional provisions of the 2008 and 2013 Acts provide, however, that “ the new provisions apply to limitation periods running from the date of their promulgation, provided that the total limitation period does not exceed that laid down by the former law ”. Accordingly, as regards the inventions unexploited inventions, for which time was held to run from November 2007, the five-year limitation period under the Act of 17 June 2008 applies. As regards the partnership, for which time was held to run from December 2014, the three-year limitation period resulting from the Act of 14 June 2013 applies.
En second lieu, the judges’ assessment differs according to whether the inventions are unexploited or exploited. For unexploited inventions, the relevant date is that on which the employee became aware of the right to additional remuneration (the patent filing date). On this point the Court of Appeal reverses the first-instance decision, which had held that time ran from the moment the employee became aware of a company remuneration scheme. For exploited inventions, the relevant date is that on which the amount of the additional remuneration became ascertainable. That case-by-case assessment led the Court here to take the end date of the research partnership.
En fin de compte, the essential lesson of the judgment is that the “floating” starting point for limitation led the Court of Appeal to hold that time ran from the filing of the patent applications, and not from the moment the additional remuneration scheme was brought to the employee’s attention. That position nevertheless appears bound up with the facts of the case (the employee’s position within the company), so that it does not, in our view, call into question the value of circulating the additional remuneration scheme among employees.