U Including a Drawing in a Patent Application Without Indicating its Creator. Civil and Criminal Law Assessment (Empirical Case)

Abstract

The buyer of property rights to an architectural project, using it to obtain a patent for an invention, has the right to use a drawing from this design without providing information about the author. Such marking of the drawing is prevented by the provisions on filing patent applications. It is also anonymous in practice before the Polish Patent Office. Moreover, it does not comply with the arrangements for the sale of the rights to the project, which also affect the personal sphere of the vendor. The drawing has a descriptive function in the application and illustrates only an exemplary variant of the invention. The lack of an authorship mark does not interfere with the creator’s bond with the drawing, as the description of the invention to which the drawing is attached is excluded from copyright
protection at the time of publication. It becomes an element of an official document showing the state of the art. Therefore, it is impossible to infringe the personal copyrights of the drawing creator, as well as to commit crimes of attributing authorship or misleading as to the authorship of someone else’s work. Even if, in a special case, there were indications of any of these torts, only the person who committed it directly could be considered the perpetrator. Therefore, if the patent application had been filed by the representative, the allegations in this respect could have been brought only against him.