Basically, Paul Mauser patented the C96 in his own name, against company policies (company invention patents are registered to the company, not to the inventor himself) as a manner of getting back at Luger and Loewe.
Georg Luger started as a consultant/representative for Mauser after being introduced by Mauser main share/stakeholder Isidor Loewe. Luger worked as a representative, using all dirty tricks in the book, but with little succes (bribery, etc..). Mauser broke with Luger after Luger took a patent on a Mauser design that was still under development. This patent trick meant that Mauser had to pay a license to Luger for any modified rifle they produced. You can imagine that this ticked off Paul Mauser severely. He subsequently used the C96 patent to get back at both Loewe and Mauser and to secure some additional deal about Luger and Loewe's shady patent practices.
On the other hand, Paul Mauser was not afraid to use patenting for his own purposes, severely limiting any developments by competitors, this includes designs that predated the C96 design on which the Mauser patents were made...
Regarding the development of the luger pistol, it is much more likely that a research and development team at Loewe / DWM did most of the field work on the redesign of the pistol and that Georg Luger merely acted as a project manager, patenting any financially relevant improvements in his own name.
This behavior of Georg Luger, which cost DWM a fortune in license fees, was the basis of a long lasting conflict between Georg Luger and the later DWM manager Paul von Gontard. Von Gontard has long been presented as the vilain of the story, trying to separate Luger from his patent rights. In fact, I think that Von Gontard recognized Luger for what he really was and took the chance to get rid of him when he could. Luger had been a protege of Isidor Loewe, who died just before WW1. So after 1914 Georg Luger was on his own, without any protection from the (old) company management.
Paul Mauser actually accused Isidor Loewe of using Georg Luger and his patent scheme in order to limit the corporate value of Paul himself. This was extra bitter to Paul because he was plagued by one important limitation all his life: lack of funds to remain independant. Mauser had to work with external financial backing from the start, and this in turn led to a loss of control over his own business.
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