Patent Drawing in Jeddah.

Jeddah files a great deal of patent work and examines none of it. Every patent drawing Jeddah inventors commission travels electronically to the Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property (SAIP) in Riyadh, on the other side of the Kingdom, to be measured against a drawing code that fits on a single page: Article 16 of the Implementing Regulations to the Law of Patents, Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits, Plant Varieties, and Industrial Designs. Four paragraphs, one of which bars shading outright. What Jeddah does keep locally is the enforcement end — an IP division of the Commercial Court, and the Kingdom’s busiest Red Sea customs gateway.

Why a patent drawing Jeddah applicant commissions is examined in Riyadh

There is no patent counter in Jeddah. SAIP is headquartered in Riyadh and receives applications through its electronic filing system, so the geography that matters to a Jeddah applicant is not the distance to an office but the fact that there is only one office. Saudi Arabia is not a party to the European Patent Convention, which means a European patent cannot be validated into the Kingdom. There is no regional Gulf patent available to new applicants either. Protection comes from a Saudi national filing or a PCT national phase entry, and both end at the same examiner.

That matters more in Jeddah than in most cities we serve, because of what Jeddah files. The city’s two largest patent producers are universities with heavily foreign-first portfolios, and their figures arrive at SAIP having already been drawn to somebody else’s rulebook. A patent drawing Jeddah client brings us is far more often a conversion problem than a blank-page problem.

What Jeddah does hold locally is the back half of the lifecycle. The city has one of only three intellectual-property divisions in the Saudi commercial court system, and Jeddah Islamic Port is where recorded rights are actually enforced against imports. Prosecution leaves the city; enforcement stays.

Article 16 is the entire Saudi drawing code, and it is four paragraphs long

Practitioners arriving from US or European practice expect a drawing standard with a sheet-size table, a margin schedule and a line-weight specification. Saudi Arabia has none of that. Article 16 of the Implementing Regulations, headed “Conditions for Drawings”, says four things:

• Article 16(1) — drawings shall be clear and of high quality for duplication
• Article 16(2) — a page may carry more than one figure, and where necessary a figure may run across more than one page, provided the pages can be easily juxtaposed to make one drawing
• Article 16(3) — figures are numbered separately from the pages; the same numbers or letters identify the same component across every figure; drawings may not be shaded and shall be presented in bold black lines; the section is highlighted with broken lines
• Article 16(4) — drawings may not contain words for the purpose of description, though words may be used where necessary to explain some of the main features

Two neighbouring articles belong with it. Article 11(5) makes drawings compulsory wherever they are necessary for a complete and clear understanding of the invention, and Article 11(3) keeps them out of the abstract, description and claims — tables go in the full description, figures go in the drawing sheets, and nothing is mixed.

The absence of a granular standard is not permission to improvise. Where Article 16 is silent, SAIP applies conventional international formalities, and PCT Rule 11 is the working baseline we build to — A4 sheets, clear unmarked margins, durable uniformly thick black lines, consecutively numbered figures. That baseline is also what the sheets must satisfy if the file arrives through the national phase, so building to it once avoids a redraw.

The shading prohibition, and why Jeddah’s biggest filers trip over it

Article 16(3) contains the single most consequential sentence in Saudi drawing practice: drawings may not be shaded. It is a flat prohibition, not a preference, and it runs directly against the instinct of anyone whose default is United States practice.

Under 37 CFR 1.84(m) the use of shading in views is encouraged if it aids understanding and does not reduce legibility; shading indicates the surface or shape of spherical, cylindrical and conical elements, and flat parts may be lightly shaded. A competent US utility set therefore arrives covered in exactly the surface modelling Article 16(3) excludes. Sectioning is a second trap: 37 CFR 1.84(h)(3) makes oblique parallel hatching mandatory to indicate section portions, preferably at 45 degrees, whereas Article 16(3) describes the Saudi section treatment only as broken lines and says nothing about hatching at all.

This is a Jeddah problem specifically because of the city’s filing profile. King Abdulaziz University, in Jeddah, has built a portfolio reported at around 580 patents. KAUST, 80-odd kilometres up the Red Sea coast at Thuwal, holds roughly 434 US patents against about 75 Saudi ones. Both file abroad first and come home second. The figures that reach SAIP from this city are, overwhelmingly, USPTO figures.

• Strip surface shading and replace contour information with line weight and view selection, not tone
• Keep sections, but carry the cutting plane on a broken line as Article 16(3) contemplates
• Never rely on solid fills or greyscale to distinguish components — use hatching sparingly, and be ready to justify or remove it
• Keep the US set intact as a separate deliverable; the two jurisdictions want different sheets, and merging them serves neither

Words in a figure become a translation line item at 30 months

Arabic is the language of the Saudi register. An application may be prepared in Arabic, or filed with a certified English copy and a translation furnished within three months. For the body of the specification that is a translator’s task. For the drawings it is a draughtsman’s task, and the two bills are not the same size.

The PCT route makes the point unavoidable. WIPO’s national chapter for Saudi Arabia requires the Arabic translation furnished on national phase entry to cover the description, the claims, the abstract and any text matter of the drawings. Entry is due at 30 months from the priority date under PCT Article 22 and equally under Article 39(1). Every label left inside a figure is therefore a separately translated, separately proofread, separately billable element arriving at a hard deadline.

Article 16(4) points the same way from the other direction: words for the purpose of description are not permitted in the drawings at all, and only genuinely necessary labels explaining main features are tolerated. The two rules converge on one discipline — a numeral-driven figure. It reads identically in the Arabic file, the English priority document and the PCT publication, and it needs no retranslation when the family extends.

• Replace descriptive labels with reference numerals wherever the description can carry the wording
• Deliver layered source files, never flattened rasters, so any surviving lettering can be substituted cleanly
• Audit flowcharts hardest — box text is where in-figure wording accumulates invisibly
• Keep text out of the margins in either script

The figures have to be echoed in the abstract, the headings and the claims

Saudi formalities tie the drawings into the rest of the document more tightly than most filers expect, and these are the objections that arrive first because formalities are examined before substance.

• Article 13(2) — where there are drawings, the abstract must refer to the figure that depicts the invention, and that figure’s number goes at the end of the abstract
• Article 13(3) — if the abstract names components shown in that figure, their numbers or letters appear in parentheses within the abstract text
• Article 14(3) — the full description must carry a “Brief Explanation of the Drawings” part, under that underlined heading, in a fixed sequence after “Background of the Invention” and “General Description of the Invention” and before “Detailed Description”
• Article 15(5) — reference numerals may appear in parentheses in a claim where the claim refers to components shown in a figure

One further provision is worth reading before the claims are settled. Article 15(3) requires the claims to define the scope of protection in a way that can be verified without recourse to the full description or the drawings, except where absolutely necessary. A Saudi claim set cannot lean on a figure to supply the structure it failed to recite, which is a useful corrective for anyone drafting with the expectation that the drawings will rescue an ambiguous limitation.

Article 11(6): a content screen that applies to the figures, not just the text

One Saudi provision has no counterpart in the US or European codes and is easy to miss because it sits in the general specification article rather than the drawing article. Article 11(6) provides that the specification may not include statements or drawings contradictory to Islamic Sharia or public morals.

For the great majority of filings this never bites. It is worth a deliberate review for a narrow band of subject matter — consumer and food products where packaging artwork or product imagery is reproduced in the figures, medical and diagnostic devices illustrated in anatomical context, and anything in the beverage, leisure or gaming space. Jeddah’s consumer-goods and private-healthcare filings sit squarely in that band.

The practical answer is almost always a drawing decision rather than a legal one. A device figure can show the apparatus and its interface without reproducing incidental imagery; an anatomical illustration can be reduced to the schematic section the claim actually needs. Both are better figures for an examiner in any event. Article 11(7) pushes in the same direction by excluding advertising material and statements disparaging competing products or methods from the specification.

What Jeddah actually files, and what those figures have to show

Jeddah’s filing profile is not Riyadh’s institutional-and-infrastructure mix, and it is not the Eastern Province’s oil-and-gas engineering. It is a Red Sea commercial city with two research heavyweights on its doorstep.

• King Abdulaziz University — a portfolio reported at around 580 patents with roughly three per cent commercialised, spread across biomedical devices, materials, environmental and water technology. Drawing-heavy in the ways examiners scrutinise hardest: apparatus cross-sections, process schematics and micrographs.
• KAUST at Thuwal — membranes and desalination, photovoltaics, catalysis and semiconductor materials, with a portfolio weighted about six to one towards US filings over Saudi ones. These sets arrive in Saudi Arabia already drawn, already published and already shaded.
• Port, logistics and materials handling — Jeddah Islamic Port drives filings in cargo handling, container systems, cold chain and inspection equipment: large mechanical assemblies needing exploded and sectional views.
• Consumer goods, food and packaging — the category where the valuable right is frequently an industrial design rather than a patent, and where the drawing is the protected subject matter.
• Private healthcare — Jeddah’s hospital groups and their suppliers file device and consumable improvements, typically a device figure plus a use-in-context view that needs careful handling under Article 11(6).
• Desalination and water treatment — a durable Red Sea coast category, almost always a flow diagram plus an apparatus figure rather than a single device drawing.

Two warnings follow from that list. Flow diagrams and system schematics are where reference-numeral discipline collapses, because the boxes are self-explanatory to the engineer who drew them and opaque to an examiner reading a translation. And micrographs and photographs, common in the university filings, belong in a file only where the subject genuinely cannot be shown in a line drawing — never as a shortcut around commissioning a proper figure.

Where Jeddah’s drawings are tested: the Commercial Court and the port

Drawings are drafted for an examiner and eventually read by a judge, and in Jeddah’s case the judge is local even though the examiner is not.

The Commercial Courts Law, issued by Royal Decree No. M/93 of 15/08/1441H (8 April 2020) and in force from 16 June 2020, sits on top of an earlier reorganisation that established commercial courts in three cities — Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam. Jurisdiction over disputes and violations arising under the intellectual property laws was moved to those courts, and it is their IP divisions, in those same three cities, that hear enforcement proceedings. Jeddah is one of the three. Alongside the court, SAIP retains its own administrative enforcement powers, including investigation, sealing premises holding counterfeit goods and issuing injunctions.

Then there is the port. Jeddah Islamic Port is the Kingdom’s principal Red Sea gateway, and recording a right with the Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) is what allows infringing imports to be stopped there. Customs officers are not patent lawyers; they work by comparison. The document doing the work at the border is a drawing — which is the strongest practical argument for filing an industrial design alongside a utility application where a Jeddah product has both functional and visual value.

It is also why we keep numbering consistent across a whole family. A Saudi action will put the Arabic file, the PCT publication and any US or European counterpart in front of the same court-appointed expert. Divergent numerals between them are an invitation to argue that the documents describe different things.

How PerspireIP prepares a patent drawing Jeddah filers can rely on

We work from whatever exists — CAD geometry, a prototype photograph, a supplier’s assembly drawing, a whiteboard sketch, or an already-granted US set that now has to go to SAIP.

• An Article 16 pass on every Saudi set — surface shading removed, bold black line work, figures numbered independently of the sheets, one numeral per component across every figure
• PCT Rule 11 as the structural baseline, so the same sheets serve a direct SAIP filing and a national phase entry without a redraw
• A text sweep against Article 16(4) and the 30-month Arabic translation requirement, reducing in-figure wording to the numerals the description can carry
• Numeral audit against the claims and description before delivery — every claimed element numbered, nothing numbered twice, no orphan numerals in either document
• Separate design sets where appearance carries value, drawn to define the claimed appearance and to be usable as a customs comparison document at the port
• Article 11(6) review on consumer, healthcare and packaging subject matter before the file leaves our hands

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 the set has to be ready for a 30-month national phase deadline, send us the date and we will work back from it.

IP Landscape & Resources in Jeddah

Key intellectual-property authorities and venues relevant to Jeddah:

• Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property (SAIP) — the Riyadh-headquartered authority that receives, examines and grants Saudi patents and industrial designs, and whose Implementing Regulations contain Article 16
• WIPO Lex – Royal Decree No. M/27 (2004) — the Law of Patents, Layout-Designs of Integrated Circuits, Plant Varieties, and Industrial Designs, the statute the Implementing Regulations sit under
• PCT Applicant's Guide – Saudi Arabia — WIPO's national chapter setting the 30-month national phase deadline and requiring the Arabic translation to cover any text matter of the drawings
• Zakat, Tax and Customs Authority (ZATCA) — the authority operating customs enforcement at Jeddah Islamic Port, where recorded rights are used to stop infringing imports

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