Industrial designs between Scylla and Charybdis

Abstract

Industrial designs are protected under intellectual property law within numerous regimes. This may be perceived as excess protection and provoke attempts to limit the hypertrophy. Recent judgments of the Polish Supreme Court and the Supreme Administrative Court relating to the criteria of copyright and design protection constitute an incentive aimed at verifying certain concepts and interpretations, as these decisions endanger the reasonableness of the protection of creativity by intellectual property law. The decisions show lack of comprehension on the part of the courts of the core concepts of copyright and design protection, which also tend to mix up the criteria. As a consequence of such interpretation, both regimes resemble the mythological sea monsters – Scylla and Charybdis.