Patent Drawing in Berlin.

Berlin is the only city in Europe with two patent-office buildings on the same street and no patent examiner in either of them. The German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) runs its Information and Service Centre and its Technical Information Centre at Gitschiner Strasse 97; the European Patent Office keeps its Berlin sub-office at number 103. Both occupy the former Imperial Patent Office, built between 1902 and 1905. Examination, however, happens in Munich and The Hague. So every patent drawing Berlin founders commission is drawn for readers somewhere else – and for two rulebooks that now disagree about colour.

Where a patent drawing Berlin applicant files actually goes

The DPMA is headquartered in Munich, with a further office in Jena and the Berlin premises on Gitschiner Strasse. The Berlin site is a genuine public-facing operation – the Technisches Informationszentrum keeps a reading room with national and international IP publications and their search tools – but a German national patent application filed from Berlin is examined by an examiner in Munich.

The EPO’s presence is similar in shape. The EPO has its registered office in Munich and a branch at The Hague, with sub-offices in Berlin and Vienna; the Berlin sub-office is a real working site of a few hundred staff, but a European application filed from Berlin is searched and examined at Munich or Rijswijk.

What that means in practice is that a Berlin filing programme almost always runs on more than one track at once: a German national application or utility model at the DPMA for speed and cost, a European application at the EPO for reach, and frequently a PCT application to keep options open. Germany is both an EPC state and a Unified Patent Court participant, so a European patent covering Germany can be taken with unitary effect or validated nationally, and the enforcement route follows from that choice.

One practical detail catches Berlin’s international founders more than any other. Proceedings at the DPMA are conducted in German. Under section 35a of the Patent Act (PatG), an application filed in a language other than German needs a German translation within three months of filing – but where the application is in English or French, that period is twelve months from the DPMA filing date, ending in any event no later than fifteen months from the priority date. Any text on the drawings is caught by that translation exercise, which is the single strongest argument for keeping words off the sheets in the first place.

Annex 2 to the Patentverordnung: the sheet-level standard

German formal requirements for drawings sit in the Patentverordnung (PatV) – the ordinance on patent procedure before the DPMA – and specifically in Annex 2 to section 12. It is more prescriptive than the UK equivalent and reads closer to 37 CFR 1.84, but the numbers are its own.

• Sheet size — DIN A4, 21 x 29.7cm, used in portrait orientation; landscape is permitted where appropriate, with the heads of the figures on the left-hand side of the portrait sheet
• Minimum margins — 2.5cm top, 2.5cm left, 1.5cm right, 1cm bottom
• Usable area — the area occupied by the figures must not exceed 26.2cm x 17cm
• Abstract figure — the drawing accompanying the abstract may instead be 8.1cm x 9.4cm portrait, or 17.4cm x 4.5cm landscape
• Lines — durable, black, sufficiently dense and dark, uniform and well-defined, executed with sufficient contrast and without colours
• Lettering — numbers and letters used on the drawings must be at least 0.32cm high
• Reproduction — the scale and the clarity of the draughtsmanship must be such that after electronic scanning, and even at a reduction to two-thirds, all details remain easily recognisable
• Condition — sheets must be free of folds and tears, and must not be folded or creased

Two of those bite most often on work exported straight from CAD. The 0.32cm character minimum is larger than most default annotation heights once a drawing is scaled to A4, and the 26.2cm x 17cm usable area is easy to overrun on a dense assembly figure once the margins are honoured. Both are cheap to fix before filing and irritating to fix afterwards.

Black ink at the DPMA, colour at the EPO, greyscale at the IB

This is the divergence that matters most to a Berlin filing programme right now, and it is genuinely new.

Annex 2 to the PatV requires German drawings to be executed in black, without colours. That has not changed. What changed is on the other side of Gitschiner Strasse: the EPO began accepting colour and greyscale drawings on 1 October 2025, under a Decision of the President published at OJ EPO 2025, A49, with an accompanying Notice at OJ EPO 2025, A57. Drawings may now be executed in colour or greyscale provided they are sufficiently rich in contrast and clearly displayable at a resolution of 300 dpi, and the concession applies only to applications filed by the EPO’s electronic filing tools – paper filings remain black and white.

The PCT international phase is a third position again. Colour is not admissible internationally; the International Bureau renders colour drawings in black and white for international publication, with the original available on PATENTSCOPE.

So a Berlin company filing DE, EP and PCT on the same invention faces one office that now welcomes colour, one that converts it, and one that refuses it outright – and the two European offices in question have buildings a hundred metres apart in Kreuzberg. The answer is not to file three different drawing sets. It is to design figures in which colour is decorative rather than load-bearing: hatching, line weights, line styles, distinct shapes and labelled arrows carrying the meaning, so the same artwork reads correctly in colour at the EPO and in monochrome at the DPMA. Our note on the EPO colour drawing reform covers the European side in full.

This lands hard on two Berlin sectors in particular. Charite and the Berlin Institute of Health generate immunohistochemistry panels, fluorescence micrographs and flow-cytometry plots whose meaning is carried by colour channels. Adlershof’s photonics and optics groups produce layouts in which optical paths, electrical paths and fluidic paths are distinguished by colour as a matter of habit. Both convert badly to greyscale unless the figure was designed for it.

The Gebrauchsmuster route, and why its drawings still have to be right

Germany offers something the US does not, and Berlin’s startups use it heavily: the Gebrauchsmuster, or utility model. It is registered without substantive examination for novelty and inventive step, it issues quickly, and it runs for a maximum term of ten years from filing rather than twenty.

It also has a feature that repays planning: a utility model can be branched off from a pending German or European patent application – the Abzweigung – taking the earlier application’s filing date. A Berlin company that needs an enforceable right against a copyist while its patent application is still in examination can often get one this way within weeks.

The temptation is to treat the drawings casually because nobody is going to examine them for inventive step. That is the wrong inference. Because a utility model is unexamined, its validity is tested for the first time in cancellation or infringement proceedings, and at that point the drawings are doing the disclosure work with no prosecution history to fall back on. Utility model drawings answer to their own ordinance rather than to the PatV, but the draughting standard is materially the same, and a branch-off is simplest when the figures were drawn once to a standard both rights can accept.

Where Berlin patents are litigated: the Landgericht and the Kammergericht

Germany concentrates patent infringement jurisdiction in twelve designated Regional Courts, each with a specialist patent chamber, and the Landgericht Berlin is one of them – alongside Dusseldorf, Mannheim, Munich I, Hamburg, Braunschweig, Frankfurt, Nuremberg-Furth, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Erfurt and Saarbrucken. An appeal from the Landgericht Berlin goes to the Kammergericht, which is simply the historic name of Berlin’s Higher Regional Court, and from there to the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe.

That said, Berlin is not where most German patent litigation happens. Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Munich take the overwhelming majority of new cases, and a Berlin claimant will frequently sue elsewhere – all the designated courts will accept jurisdiction where an infringing product is offered over the internet, which in practice gives a claimant a wide choice of forum.

The structural point a Berlin defendant needs to understand is bifurcation. The German national system splits infringement from validity: the Landgericht hears infringement and cannot revoke the patent, while validity is attacked separately by nullity action before the Federal Patent Court (Bundespatentgericht) in Munich, with appeal to the Federal Court of Justice. Because the two proceed on different timetables, an injunction can issue before the validity attack is decided – the so-called injunction gap. For drawings this raises the stakes considerably, because the figures will be construed in an infringement court that is not simultaneously testing whether they support the claims.

The UPC is the other route, and here Berlin has no seat. Germany hosts four UPC local divisions – Munich, Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Hamburg – and Berlin is not among them, so a Berlin business litigating a European patent with unitary effect, or a non-opted-out classical European patent, will be before one of those four or before a central division seat in Paris, Munich or Milan. Unlike the national courts, a UPC division handles infringement and validity together.

Whichever forum applies, consistency across the family is what protects you. A German action will put the DE file, the EP file and the PCT publication in front of the same judge, and reference numerals that drift between them invite an argument that the documents describe different inventions. We hold numbering identical across every family member – the same discipline behind our patent invalidation work in Berlin.

What Berlin actually files, and what those figures demand

Berlin’s filing profile is unusually broad for a single city, because the capital’s research base and its startup scene barely overlap.

• Software, AI and platform businesses — Europe’s largest startup ecosystem by funding. The figures are flowcharts, system architecture diagrams, sequence diagrams and user-interface views. This is where text-on-drawings discipline collapses most often, because a self-explanatory box diagram is exactly what the EPO and the PCT will not accept.
• Photonics, optics and microsystems — the Adlershof science and technology park in Treptow-Kopenick, one of Germany’s largest. Optical bench layouts, waveguide cross-sections and MEMS process-flow sequences, where the figure must distinguish optical from electrical paths without using colour to do it.
• Medical devices and cardiac technology — BIOTRONIK has been headquartered in Berlin since 1963. Implantable device work is the most drawing-intensive category we handle: exploded assemblies, sectional views through leads and housings, and multi-position figures showing a device through its operating range.
• Pharmaceuticals and life sciences — Bayer’s Berlin site, the legacy of Schering, plus Charite and the Berlin Institute of Health. Structural formulae, assay traces, dose-response curves and histology – much of it colour-dependent, and much of it filed as chemical formulae which count as drawings in their own right.
• Mobility and industrial engineering — Siemens in Siemensstadt, Deutsche Bahn’s engineering base, and the Brandenburg neighbours that feed the Berlin IP market: Tesla’s Gigafactory at Grunheide and Rolls-Royce Deutschland at Dahlewitz. Mechanical assemblies, powertrain sections and control schematics.

Two categories deserve a specific warning. Flowcharts and architecture diagrams are where reference-numeral discipline fails, because the boxes are obvious to the engineer who drew them and opaque to a formalities examiner who is also counting words. And chemical structures are drawings, not typesetting – they inherit the whole of the sheet standard, including lettering height and reduction legibility, which is a surprise to most chemists the first time they hear it.

How PerspireIP prepares a patent drawing Berlin filers can rely on

We work from whatever exists – CAD geometry, a micrograph stack, a supplier assembly drawing, a whiteboard photograph, a pitch-deck diagram – and produce a formal sheet set built to the standard that will actually be applied to it.

• Drawn to the strictest applicable rulebook so one set serves the DPMA, the EPO and the PCT without redrawing at each stage
• Colour-independent figure design — hatching, line weights and labelling carry the meaning, so the artwork survives the DPMA’s black-ink requirement and the International Bureau’s monochrome conversion while still filing in colour at the EPO
• PatV Annex 2 compliance checks — A4, 25/25/15/10mm margins, a 26.2 x 17cm usable area, characters above 0.32cm, legible at two-thirds reduction after scanning
• Minimal text matter, positioned with clear space around it so a German translation can be overlaid without running into drawing lines
• Numeral audit against the claims and description before delivery: every claimed element numbered, no numeral used twice, no orphans in either document
• Utility model sets prepared so a Gebrauchsmuster branch-off needs no redrawing
• Family consistency so the German sheets match the European, PCT and US counterparts numeral for numeral

Turnaround on a standard utility set is measured in days, not weeks, and we quote on figure count and complexity rather than an hourly estimate. If a set has to be ready for a twelve-month Paris Convention deadline, a thirty-month national phase date or a DPMA translation deadline under section 35a PatG, tell us the date and we work back from it. We do the same work in Munich, and across the rest of our German practice.

IP Landscape & Resources in Berlin

Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Berlin:

• German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA) — the Munich-headquartered office that examines German patents and registers utility models, with its Information and Service Centre and Technical Information Centre in Berlin
• Patentverordnung (PatV), Annex 2 to section 12 — the German standard for filing drawings – sheet size, margins, usable area, line quality, lettering height and reduction legibility
• European Patent Office — registered office in Munich, branch at The Hague, sub-offices in Berlin and Vienna; source of the 1 October 2025 colour drawing reform
• Unified Patent Court — the court with divisions in Munich, Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Hamburg that hears unitary and non-opted-out European patent disputes affecting German businesses

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