Protection of objects of industrial property, as one of the youngest branches of law, is evolving to keep up with times and following most recent trends, also in the field of legal solutions, such as adaptation of procedures for amicable resolution of disputes. The tradition of mediation and negotiation is rooted in a very remote history, however application of the same to resolve disputes in the area of intellectual property has only recently started to attract serious interest. It is in this spirit that the amendments to the provisions of the Act on the Industrial Property Law and to the Code of Administrative Procedure have introduced an alternative for hitherto-existing administrative and legal procedures, namely the methods of amicable resolution of disputes, including, in particular, mediation. These solutions, apart from obvious strengths for the parties involved, resulting from the ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution), have also faced the Patent Office of the Republic of Poland with new tasks in the scope of procedural administration and in that of application of new legal regulations in the field of activities reaching beyond the area of its previous competence.
At present, the Patent Office of the RP offers two formal paths for amicable resolution of disputes. While each follows very different principles and legal regimes, what they have in common is standards that are the same for any ADR. Namely, the two paths adopted and presently applied by the Office for amicable disputes are: firstly, WIPO mediation, and, secondly, administrative mediation basing on the provisions of the Code of Administrative Procedure.