Patent Drawing in Krakow.

A patent drawing Krakow engineer files is examined nowhere near Krakow. The Patent Office of the Republic of Poland (UPRP) sits in Warsaw, there is no patent office in Lesser Poland, and if the resulting patent is ever litigated the case goes to Warsaw as well. What makes Krakow filings distinctive is not the venue but the subject matter: this is Poland’s second-largest technology centre, with more than 60,000 tech specialists and around 400 IT companies, and software, telecoms and drug-discovery inventions collide with the one Polish drawing rule that foreign teams never see coming — the near-total ban on text on the sheet. PerspireIP prepares figures for inventors, Polish patent attorneys (rzecznicy patentowi) and in-house teams filing at the UPRP, on the European route through the EPO, and on PCT national phase.

Which rules govern a patent drawing Krakow applicant files

Polish drawing law is split across two instruments, and the operative one is the less obvious of the pair. The Industrial Property Law (Prawo własności przemysłowej, the Act of 30 June 2000) does only the high-level work: Article 31(2) requires drawings in a patent application if they are necessary to understand the invention. For utility models Article 97(2) goes further, providing that the application contains drawings showing the essential technical features — there, figures are not optional at all.

How a figure must actually look is set by the Ordinance of the Prime Minister of 17 September 2001 on the filing and examination of applications for inventions and utility models (Dz.U. 2001 No. 102, item 1119), last amended with effect from 30 November 2016 and still in force. Section 10 of that ordinance deals with the substance of drawings; the formal requirements sit in Annex 1, a list of thirty-one numbered points. Nearly every avoidable objection traces to one of them.

The point that catches imported work is Annex 1 point 10, which sets the minimum margins on sheets containing drawings. The left margin is the outlier, and it is wrong by a full centimetre on any sheet built to American minimums.

• Top margin 25 mm — same as 37 CFR 1.84(g) and PCT Rule 11.6.
• Left margin 35 mm — the USPTO and the PCT both require only 25 mm. This is the single most common defect in sets arriving from US counsel.
• Right margin 15 mm and bottom margin 10 mm — both match the international figures.
• A4 sheets, 297 mm by 210 mm, portrait, one side only, with no frame and no line separating any margin, and the margins kept clean of file references (points 8, 4, 3, 11, 12).

Two further constraints apply to every sheet regardless of technology. Point 23 requires durable, black, intense and sharply defined lines, and WIPO’s PCT Applicant’s Guide chapter for Poland confirms the UPRP does not accept colour drawings under national law. Point 1 then requires the whole application to remain fully legible in all details after reproduction at two-thirds linear reduction — a figure that only works at full size fails even if every line is black.

The Krakow industries that actually drive local filings

Krakow is not a general-purpose filing centre, and its sector mix maps onto specific Annex 1 provisions. Software, telecoms and chemistry dominate, which means flowcharts, block diagrams and structural formulae rather than the powertrain sections you would see in Graz or Stuttgart. Each sector fails formalities in a characteristic way.

• Enterprise software and telecoms R&D. ABB has run its Corporate Research Center in Krakow since 1997; Motorola Solutions has had a major R&D site here since the 1990s; Comarch grew out of AGH University in 1993 and now employs more than 6,500 people. Google, IBM, Ericsson and Aptiv all run Krakow R&D, and Cisco is investing PLN 200 million in a local data centre that includes AI research laboratories. These are method and system cases, carried almost entirely by flowcharts and block diagrams — the figures most exposed to the Annex 1 point 22 text restriction.
• Drug discovery and life sciences. Ryvu Therapeutics, a clinical-stage small-molecule oncology company, is headquartered in Krakow, and Selvita — founded here in 2007 — is one of Europe’s larger contract research organisations. Chemistry cases hit a classification rule most people miss, covered below.
• University and materials research. AGH University of Krakow is among Poland’s most active patent filers, obtaining close to 100 patents a year and ranking second among Polish applicants at the EPO in 2023 with 30 applications. Jagiellonian University adds life-science and physics filings. Mechanical and materials inventions from both often suit the utility model route, where drawings are mandatory.
• Game development and interface design. Krakow’s studio cluster generates graphical user interface subject matter, where the figure is a screen layout covered in words. That is the hardest category to make Annex 1 compliant without redrawing.

Annex 1 point 22: why Krakow software figures need redrawing, not relabelling

This is the provision that costs Krakow filers the most time, and it has no close analogue in US practice. Point 22 says drawings should not contain text, with an exception only for single words where they are genuinely necessary. The ordinance supplies its own examples: woda (water), para (steam), otwarte (open), zamknięte (closed), przekrój AB (section AB).

There is one narrow concession, and it is what makes software filings workable at all: a few words may appear in process-flow diagrams and block diagrams where they are indispensable to understanding the schematic. “A few words” is the operative limit. It does not stretch to a flowchart whose every box carries a full sentence, which is how method claims are usually drafted for the USPTO.

The fix is structural. Prose labels have to become numbered reference signs carried in the description, and for a flowchart-led application that is a redraw rather than a relabel. Scoping it before a deadline is considerably cheaper than discovering it during one, and it is the first thing we check on a method or system case.

Whatever words do survive become a translation cost. The PCT Applicant’s Guide chapter for Poland requires the Polish translation furnished on national phase entry to cover any text matter of the drawings alongside the description, claims and abstract. On the European route the exposure is larger still, because Poland is not a London Agreement state and validation needs a full Polish translation of the specification.

Lettering has its own floor. Point 27 requires digits and letters on drawings to be at least 3.2 mm high — the one dimension where Poland and the United States agree exactly, since 37 CFR 1.84(p)(3) sets the same 0.32 cm minimum. Point 25 adds that digits and letters must not be enclosed in brackets, circles or quotation marks, which rules out the circled reference numerals common in European engineering drawings.

Chemistry cases: structural formulae count as drawings

For Krakow’s drug-discovery filers this is the non-obvious one. Under section 10(3) of the ordinance, chemical structural formulae presented on separate sheets count as drawings, and wherever later provisions refer to figures they include those formulae — which are labelled as a formula (wzór) rather than as a figure.

The consequence is that a chemistry application with no apparatus drawings at all still acquires drawing sheets, and those sheets inherit the drawing-sheet rules: the 35 mm left margin of point 10, the black-line requirement of point 23, the 3.2 mm character floor of point 27 and the two-thirds reduction legibility test of point 1. A Markush structure typeset to fit a journal column routinely fails the last of those.

Section 11 adds a related obligation at the abstract stage. The abstract must give the number of the figure that best illustrates the invention, and where the subject matter requires it the abstract carries the chemical formula that best characterises the invention — which may sit on a separate sheet attached to the abstract. Reference signs in parentheses should follow each main technical feature named in the abstract.

Why a Krakow patent dispute is heard in three other cities

Poland created specialised intellectual-property divisions on 1 July 2020, placing them in five Regional Courts: Warsaw, Poznań, Gdańsk, Lublin and Katowice. Krakow did not get one, and the resulting split is unusual enough to be worth planning around.

• Patents and other technical rights go to Warsaw. The Regional Court in Warsaw, XXII Intellectual Property Division, has exclusive first-instance jurisdiction over cases concerning inventions, supplementary protection certificates, computer programs, integrated-circuit topographies, plant varieties and technical trade secrets — wherever in Poland the parties are.
• Other IP disputes go to Katowice. The Regional Court in Katowice, XXIV Intellectual Property Division, covers the Krakow regional court area along with Bielsko-Biała, Częstochowa, Gliwice, Nowy Sącz, Opole, Rybnik and Tarnów. Trademark, copyright, design and unfair-competition claims from Krakow are heard there.
• Appeals go to Poznań. Second-instance IP divisions sit in only two Courts of Appeal, Warsaw and Poznań. The Poznań division covers the Katowice and Wrocław appellate areas and the part of the Krakow appellate area comprising the Krakow and Nowy Sącz district courts.

Representation is not optional at scale. In IP cases the Code of Civil Procedure requires a party to be represented by an advocate, an attorney-at-law or a patent attorney where the value of the dispute exceeds PLN 20,000, though the court may release a party from that obligation in less complex cases. The inclusion of patent attorneys is useful: the professional who prosecuted the application can carry it into court.

Poland is an EPC contracting state but is not in the Unified Patent Court, so a European patent validated here is enforced only in the Polish national courts and the UPC has no jurisdiction over the Polish part. For figures this concentrates risk: one division in Warsaw sees every technical case in the country and develops settled expectations about what a drawing set should show. A sectional view omitted at filing to save a sheet cannot be added later without adding matter.

Routes into Poland and what each does to your figures

Which rulebook applies depends entirely on how a Krakow applicant arrives, and the three routes treat drawings differently.

• National UPRP filing. The ordinance and Annex 1 apply in full, and the office asks for the drawings in one copy.
• PCT national phase. The national route is open and Annex 1 governs. The deadline is 30 months from the priority date under both PCT Article 22(1) and Article 39(1)(a) — 30, not the 31 months several neighbouring offices allow. Assuming the longer period is an expensive mistake.
• European patent validated in Poland. Those figures were examined under EPC practice, so Annex 1 never applies to them. Poland joined the EPC on 1 March 2004 and is not a London Agreement state, so validation needs a full Polish translation of the specification, filed within three months of publication of the mention of grant in the European Patent Bulletin. That deadline is neither extendable nor restorable.
• Utility model (wzór użytkowy). Section 16 applies the drawing machinery, and section 16(4) adds a requirement with no patent equivalent: figure 1 should show a general view of the subject matter where needed. Figure 1 is not a free choice.

The European route has also moved away from the Polish and international standard, and recently. Rule 46 EPC no longer exists — it was deleted along with Rule 49(3) to (12) EPC with effect from 1 February 2023, and the drawing form requirements moved into a Decision of the President of the EPO published in the Official Journal. Since 1 October 2025 the EPO has accepted electronically filed drawings in colour or greyscale. The PCT did not follow: Rule 11.13(a) still requires black lines without colourings, which is why the international and Polish standards remain aligned while the EPO has diverged.

On representation before the office, the rule is narrower than it is usually stated. An agent must be appointed where the applicant has neither a residence nor a principal place of business in Poland or in another EU or EFTA member state. A German or French applicant therefore does not need Polish representation on that ground; a US, Japanese or Indian applicant does.

What a patent drawing Krakow project includes

We work from whatever exists: CAD exports, architecture diagrams, UML or flowchart sketches, chemical structures drawn in ChemDraw, screen captures, photographs or a whiteboard photo. The deliverable is a filing-ready sheet set plus the editable source, so later amendments do not mean starting again.

• Formal sheets to UPRP Annex 1, with the 35 mm left margin applied and verified rather than assumed.
• Conversion of flowchart and block-diagram text into numbered reference signs, with a reference-sign list for the description.
• A wykaz oznaczeń — the separate reference-sign schedule Annex 1 point 31 recommends where a set carries many signs.
• Two-way reconciliation of reference signs against the description, in both directions, as point 29 requires.
• Parallel EPO and PCT variants where a case is being filed on more than one route, including colour or greyscale versions for the EPO where they now help.
• Utility model sets with figure 1 built as a general view.
• Replacement sheets in response to a UPRP formalities notice, usually within 48 hours.

Files are handled confidentially and we do not publish or reuse client subject matter. For Krakow work we quote in advance per sheet, so the cost is known before anything is drawn.

Seven checks before a Krakow filing goes out

Each check maps to a numbered point of Annex 1 or a provision of the ordinance, so any objection can be traced back to its source.

1. Measure the left margin. 35 mm minimum, not the 25 mm a USPTO or PCT template will have applied (point 10).
2. Confirm the line work is black. Durable, intense and sharp, with no colour and no photographic prints (point 23).
3. Shrink it to two-thirds. Every detail must stay legible at that reduction (point 1).
4. Strip the text. Indispensable single words only, with the narrow concession for process and block diagrams (point 22).
5. Check character height and presentation. At least 3.2 mm, and never in brackets, circles or quotation marks (points 27, 25).
6. Reconcile reference signs both ways. Nothing on a figure that is absent from the description, nothing in the description that is absent from the figures, and the same sign for the same element throughout (point 29).
7. Check the numbering series separately. Figures numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals and clearly separated; sheets numbered centre-top below the top margin — two different series, easily conflated (points 28, 13).

If only one item gets the extra minute, make it the left margin. It is the only dimension where a sheet drafted correctly for the USPTO and the PCT is wrong in Poland, and nothing on the face of the drawing reveals it.

IP Landscape & Resources in Krakow

Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Krakow:

• Patent Office of the Republic of Poland (UPRP) — grants Polish patents and utility models from Warsaw; there is no patent office in Krakow. Drawing form requirements are in Annex 1 to the ordinance of 17 September 2001 (Dz.U. 2001 No. 102, item 1119)
• European Patent Office — the EPC route into Poland, which has been a contracting state since 1 March 2004; Rule 46 EPC was deleted on 1 February 2023 and since 1 October 2025 the EPO accepts electronically filed colour and greyscale drawings, which Polish national practice does not
• Regional Court in Warsaw, XXII Intellectual Property Division — holds exclusive first-instance jurisdiction over Polish patent, SPC and computer-program disputes; a Krakow patent case is heard here, not locally
• Regional Court in Katowice, XXIV Intellectual Property Division — the IP division covering the Krakow regional court area for trademark, copyright, design and unfair-competition claims
• WIPO PCT Applicant's Guide, national chapter PL — confirms the 30-month Polish national phase deadline, the requirement to translate text matter of drawings, and that the UPRP does not accept colour drawings under national law

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