PRACE NAD PRZYGOTOWANIEM USTAW PATENTOWYCH W OKRESIE TYMCZASOWEJ RADY STANU KROLESTWA POLSKIEGO, 1917–1918

Shortly after Poland regained its independency in November 1918, the Chief of State Józef Piłsudski signed two decrees introducing the patent law in the country and bringing the Polish Patent Office into existence. In recent literature, the introduction of both decrees has been acknowledged as the starting point of legal patent protection in the independent Poland, while it is largely forgotten to whom the whole preparatory work should have been attributed. The draft of the patent law signed by Piłsudski has been worked out well before November 1918, by the Ministry of Industry of the Provisional Council of State of the Kingdom of Poland, a quasi-independent governing body established by the German and Austro-Hungarian occupying forces. This article attempts to reconstruct a contemporary discourse upon that issue, while explaining at the same time the reasons that made the enacted law very much imperfect. This work is based mainly on authentic documents from that era, and, since it uses both legal and technical writings, it is a novel attempt to address this issue. This paper argues that deficiencies of the first Polish patent legislation resulted from inability or, perhaps, unwillingness of the Ministry of Industry to seek advices from the experts in patent law – lawyers and patent agents, unquestionably being the most predisposed to this task.