Patent Drawing in Toulouse.

Toulouse builds the things France will not let you talk about yet. Airbus assembles commercial aircraft at Blagnac, Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space build satellites in the same metropolitan area, and CNES — the French space agency, with the largest national space budget in Europe — runs its technical centre here. Every patent application they file leaves Toulouse and goes through a door no other European filing passes: under Article L.612-9 of the Intellectual Property Code, INPI forwards every French patent application to the Ministry of Defence within fifteen days, and the invention cannot be disclosed or freely worked until authorisation comes back. A patent drawing Toulouse engineers commission is therefore drawn for an examiner near Paris, for a defence reviewer who will see it before anyone else does, and for a figure set that cannot be quietly corrected once the clock starts.

Where a patent drawing Toulouse applicant actually files

There is no patent office in Toulouse. The Institut national de la propriete industrielle (INPI) is headquartered at Courbevoie in the Paris region and takes French national filings electronically, so an Occitanie applicant files into the same queue as a Parisian one and is examined on the same basis.

What that examination involves changed with the Loi PACTE. INPI once refused French applications only for manifest lack of novelty; it now runs a full substantive examination, and inventive step has been an examined patentability requirement for applications filed on or after 22 May 2020. A pre-grant opposition procedure is available against French patents granted from 1 April 2020. The French national route now behaves much more like EPO prosecution than it did, and the drawings carry correspondingly more weight as the record of what was disclosed.

Two PACTE instruments get heavy use in a deep-tech cluster like this one, and both punish a weak figure set:

• The demande provisoire de brevet — a provisional French application available since 1 July 2020 under Decret n° 2020-15 of 8 January 2020. It secures a filing date cheaply, and the applicant then has twelve months to regularise it into a patent application or convert it into a utility certificate.
• The certificat d’utilite — the French utility certificate, whose term PACTE raised to a maximum of ten years, and which can now be converted into a patent application instead of being a dead end.

A provisional is precisely where figure quality gets traded for speed, and precisely where that trade costs most: the provisional fixes the disclosure the later application has to fit inside. A sketch that omits a load path, a bulkhead interface or a deployment stage cannot be repaired twelve months later without losing the priority date.

The defence review every Toulouse filing passes through

This is the provision that makes a patent drawing Toulouse brief different from one in Lyon or Bordeaux, and most applicants outside France have never heard of it.

Under Article L.612-9 of the Code de la propriete intellectuelle, INPI is required to submit every patent and utility certificate application to the Ministry of Defence within fifteen days of filing. Until authorisation is given, the invention may not be disclosed or freely worked, the application is not made public, and no copies may be issued. Authorisation is acquired automatically at the end of five months from the filing date unless the prohibition is extended, and it is granted by the Director of INPI on the advice of the Minister responsible for defence.

For an aerospace, space or dual-use filing out of Toulouse, three practical consequences follow:

• The figure set has to be right at filing. During the prohibition you cannot publish, demonstrate or freely exploit the invention, so the usual habit of filing thin and tidying up once the product is public is unavailable.
• A reviewer who is not a patent examiner reads your drawings. The defence assessment is about what the figures teach a technically literate reader. Figures that are ambiguous about a sensor placement or an antenna geometry invite a longer look, not a shorter one.
• Foreign filing is gated. Where the prohibition is extended rather than lapsing at five months, onward filing abroad depends on authorisation. A PCT or US filing programme planned on the assumption of a clean twelve-month Paris Convention year can collide with it.

There is a related filing pattern worth knowing in this city: a proportion of the most sensitive radar and electronic-warfare work in the French aerospace sector is filed nationally at INPI rather than routed through the EPO, precisely because of dual-use sensitivity. That choice puts the French black-line sheet standard — not the EPO’s — on the critical path.

INPI sheet rules: black line, no colour, and no petition to fix it

French formal requirements for patent application documents live in a decision of the Director General of INPI — Decision n° 2018-156 of 8 November 2018, as modified — rather than in the Code itself. The provisions that catch CAD-native aerospace teams are these:

• Black lines and strokes, sans couleur ni lavis — without colour and without wash. There is no petition route in France. Compare 37 CFR 1.84(a)(2), which admits colour in a US utility application on a granted petition with the fee set by 37 CFR 1.17(h), and the EPO, which has accepted colour and greyscale on electronically filed applications since 1 October 2025. France simply says no.
• Margins are ranges, not minimums — top 2–4 cm, left 2.5–4 cm, right 2–3 cm, bottom 2–3 cm, on A4 only. A sheet drawn to 37 CFR 1.84(g), which permits a 1.5 cm right and 1.0 cm bottom margin, fails in France. France also imposes an upper bound the USPTO does not.
• Black-and-white photographs are accepted where reproducible and otherwise compliant — more permissive than 1.84(b)(1), which admits photographs only as the sole practicable medium. France is strict on colour and comparatively relaxed about photographs, which suits composite fractography and failure-analysis exhibits.
• Legibility at two-thirds linear reduction. Statements such as "grandeur nature" or "echelle 1/2" are barred, as under 1.84(k); a graphic scale bar is acceptable.
• Reference-sign reciprocity. A sign in the drawings must appear in the description and a sign in the description must appear in the drawings. INPI’s guidance treats this as admitting no exception, and the same element keeps the same sign throughout.

There is a filing-date trap behind all of this. Under R.612-9, drawings referred to but not filed may be supplied within two months — but the filing date moves to the date they arrive, unless priority is claimed and the applicant states that the missing parts were in the earlier application. On an aerospace programme where the priority date is the asset, that is not a formality. And under R.612-46, failure to regularise a presentation irregularity means the application is refused, not merely objected to.

The screenshot rule that catches Toulouse avionics and ground-segment filings

France has a drawing prohibition with no US or EPO counterpart, and it lands squarely on the software side of this city’s portfolio — cockpit displays, flight-management interfaces, satellite ground-segment consoles, mission-planning tools.

A French patent drawing may not reproduce a computer screen displaying a third party’s copyright-protected software interface. The basis is copyright, not patent law: Articles L.112-2 and L.122-1 to L.122-4 of the Code de la propriete intellectuelle. The accepted substitute is a stylised rectangle standing in for the display, with the claimed content shown schematically.

This is easy to breach without noticing. An avionics HMI invention illustrated with a screen capture of the actual certified display — complete with a supplier’s widget set and window furniture — is exactly the figure the rule is aimed at. Two further points follow for software-heavy filings:

• Flowcharts, step schemas and block diagrams are drawings for French purposes and belong on the sheets. Functional labels inside the blocks of a circuit or process diagram are normal practice and are not caught by the no-text rule.
• Code listings may not appear on the drawings. They go in an annex at the end of the description under R.612-13.

Text on the sheets is otherwise confined to what INPI calls courtes indications indispensables — short, indispensable indications. The office’s own examples are single words of the order of eau, vapeur, ouvert, ferme, coupe suivant AB. Anything resembling a sentence is an irregularity.

Where a Toulouse patent dispute is heard: Paris, and only Paris

Occitanie has courts, but none of them will hear your patent case. The Tribunal judiciaire de Paris holds exclusive national jurisdiction over French patent matters, through its third chamber, with appeal to the cour d’appel de Paris and then the Cour de cassation. An infringement brought by a Toulouse manufacturer against a competitor in the same industrial park is litigated some six hundred kilometres north.

The Unified Patent Court concentrates matters further, and in a way that is unusually relevant here. Paris hosts both a local division and the seat of the central division. The Paris seat takes central-division cases in IPC sections B, D, E, G and H — and that allocation captures nearly all of Toulouse’s output:

• Section B includes B64 — aircraft, aviation and cosmonautics. Airframes, satellites and launchers land in Paris.
• Section G covers physics and instruments, which is where avionics sensing, navigation and radar subject matter sits.
• Section H covers electricity and electronics, including the antenna and communications payload work done across this metropolitan area.

So a revocation action against a Toulouse-origin European patent is heard by the Paris seat of the central division, in the same city as the examining office and the national court. In all three forums the figures are read as disclosure, not decoration: a reference sign on a sheet with no counterpart in the description, a deployment figure that contradicts the brief description, or sectional hatching that stops distinguishing two composite plies after reproduction is an argument handed to the other side about what the application actually taught.

What Toulouse actually files, and what those figures demand

The industrial base here concentrates in three overlapping areas, and each makes a specific demand of a figure set.

• Aerostructures and commercial aircraft. Airbus’s commercial aircraft activity and final assembly at Blagnac, with ATR, Safran and Liebherr Aerospace in the supply base. These inventions are large assemblies: they need exploded views to show build order, sectional views through joints and bulkheads, and detail callouts that stay legible at two-thirds reduction. Composite ply layups and bonded joints have to be distinguished by hatching, because the colour that would do it in a CAD viewer is unavailable at INPI.
• Space systems. Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space build satellites here, and CNES runs its technical centre in the city. Deployment mechanisms — solar arrays, antennas, booms — are multi-state inventions, and the stowed, intermediate and deployed configurations each need their own figure with consistent reference signs across all three. Omitting the intermediate state is the most common disclosure gap we see in this subject matter.
• Avionics, electronics and embedded software. Onboard systems, ground segment and mission software, supported by ISAE-SUPAERO and Universite Toulouse III — Paul Sabatier. Here the screenshot prohibition and the code-listing rule govern, and the work is in converting an interface or an algorithm into schematic block and flow figures that disclose the invention without reproducing a protected display.

One pattern runs through all three. Toulouse files into a national route with a hard colour ban, a defence review, and a refusal sanction for unregularised presentation defects — while the same inventions go to the EPO, which now accepts colour, and to the USPTO, which accepts it on petition. The sheet standards diverge, and the direction of conversion matters: a black-line INPI-compliant master converts cleanly upward to the EPO and the USPTO, whereas a colour EPO set has to be redrawn to come back down to INPI.

How PerspireIP prepares a patent drawing Toulouse filers can rely on

We draw the French national set first and derive the rest from it, because that is the only direction the conversion works without redrawing.

• A black-line master built to Decision n° 2018-156 — French margin ranges on A4, no colour and no wash, lettering and reference signs legible at two-thirds reduction, text limited to short indispensable indications.
• Reference-sign reconciliation against the description in both directions before filing, so the reciprocity requirement and the brief description of the figures agree with what is actually on the sheets.
• Screen content redrawn as stylised displays for avionics and ground-segment filings, with the claimed interface behaviour shown schematically rather than captured.
• Multi-state figure sets for deployable space hardware, with stowed, intermediate and deployed configurations and consistent signs across them.
• EPO, PCT and USPTO variants derived from the same master — colour or greyscale where the EPO now permits it, Rule 11 margins for the International Bureau, and a 37 CFR 1.84 set with the petition route flagged where colour genuinely carries information.
• Confidential handling throughout, which matters when the subject matter is going to a defence review before it is going anywhere else.

Send CAD, test imagery, interface specifications or rough sketches and we will come back with scope, price and turnaround for an INPI filing, a demande provisoire, a certificat d’utilite, a European application or a PCT filing.

IP Landscape & Resources in Toulouse

Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Toulouse:

• Institut national de la propriete industrielle (INPI) — the French office that receives and examines national patent applications, utility certificates and provisional applications, headquartered at Courbevoie in the Paris region
• Article L.612-9, Code de la propriete intellectuelle — the defence-review provision: INPI forwards every application to the Ministry of Defence within fifteen days, and authorisation to disclose or work the invention is acquired automatically five months after filing unless the prohibition is extended
• European Patent Office — the route to European protection for Toulouse applicants, and the source of the 1 October 2025 reform admitting colour and greyscale drawings on electronically filed applications
• Unified Patent Court — hosts a local division in Paris and the seat of the central division, which takes central-division cases in IPC sections B, D, E, G and H – covering aerospace, instruments and electronics

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