Appendix G

The Tribunale di Firenze Ruling, 2020

In June 2020 a court in Florence was asked whether the Human Design System could be owned. The proceeding was narrow and commercial, but the finding reached the foundation of every ownership claim documented in this book. The plaintiff was Human Design Italia, holding itself out as the exclusive Italian-language licensee of Ra Uru Hu’s company, Jovian Archive; the defendant was the publisher Terra Nuova, which in June 2019 had published Chetan Parkyn’s Human Design – Scopri la Tua Vera Natura. The claim was that no one but Human Design Italia could publish a Human Design book in Italian.¹

The court rejected the claim. In an ordinance dated 3 June 2020, the Sezione Specializzata in materia di Impresa held:

No evidence has been provided by the claimants to prove that they had exclusive rights on the “Human Design System” or its teachings: those teachings cover ideas, procedures, methodologies of representation that can be freely talked about, mentioned and illustrated even by those who are not the creators, without this infringing intellectual property rights; nor, to do so, does one need to be authorized by a school or by its founders, since in our legal system the representation of ideas is free and is not subjected to cult-like behaviors.²

The order located the principle where United States law and the Berne Convention locate it (that no copyright subsists in an idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery) and drew the consequence: a right Krakower could not hold, he could not have transferred; the object of the transfer “cannot be the right to exploit copyright that does not exist”; and neither Jovian Archive “nor its assignees could prevent others from publishing other works on the ‘Human Design System.’”³

The ruling binds no court outside Italy. It is recorded here because it is the one occasion on which the ownership claim was tested by a neutral authority, and failed.