1911 (16)

As the pistol’s completion began to come into sight, the legal issues we’d temporarily set aside while it was still only an experimental project resurfaced.

The Imperial legal adviser said it was time to change our research license agreement into a production license and formally file patents for the mechanisms we’d developed at the workshop.

“Isn’t that a little late?”

“Haven’t you kept finding excuses to put it off, Your Highness?”

Whenever the legal adviser brought up filing a patent, he arrived with a law book thicker than a textbook. At first, I figured it was something we had to do, so I filed the applications. But once or twice was one thing; it wasn’t easy to keep filing them with that massive book always at hand. So I’d kept putting it off, but now I didn’t think I could anymore.

He spread several patent drawings across the wall of the workshop’s meeting room.

The Borchardt pistol, Mauser’s automatic pistol, Luger’s improved model, and Browning’s automatic pistol filled the wall in turn.

Some of them were completely different from our pistol. But others were so similar that someone seeing them for the first time might have mistaken them for products from the same company.

The legal adviser tapped the drawings with his finger and said,

“As you all know, the workshop hasn’t been secretly using these rights. We’ve already signed temporary license agreements with the rights holders for the parts of patents valid in Germany that we needed for our prototypes. We’ve been paying royalties, too.”...