Short answer. No, the Polish Patent Office will not tell you that someone filed a lookalike of your mark. It tells the applicant about you.
That is not an oversight. It is written into the act.
The office stopped checking for you in 2016
On 15 April 2016 Poland moved from a full examination system to an opposition system. The amendment of 11 September 2015 (Dz.U. 2015 poz. 1615) cut the office's own examination down to absolute grounds. Distinctiveness, descriptiveness, bad faith, that family of issues. Whether a new mark collides with an earlier one stopped being the office's job.
The office says this itself. Its own guide on opposition grounds opens with the sentence, that the ex officio examination now covers absolute grounds only and relative grounds became a matter for opposition.
But it still sends one letter
Article 146(1)(6) of the Industrial Property Law. For an application that is going to be published, the office prepares a notice listing identical or similar earlier trademarks with earlier priority, covering the same or similar goods, and sends it to the applicant. The same provision says the notice is purely informational and not binding.
Read that again. The office runs a similarity search, finds your registration, puts your number and your name in a letter, and posts it to the person who just filed against you.
UPRP repeats it in plain language on its own applicant page, that the office will notify the applicant about similar or identical earlier marks which could be raised in an opposition or later lead to cancellation.
You get nothing. No copy, no heads up, no email.
How much runway they get
The application shows up in the office database within 2 months of the filing date, under Article 146(1)(2). Publication in the Bulletin comes after that. From publication you have 3 months to oppose under Article 152(17)(1), and that deadline cannot be reinstated.
So the applicant is reading about your registration early, while you are sitting on a deadline you do not know has started.
The opposition fee is 600 PLN, from item 18 of the fee table in Dz.U. 2016 poz. 1623. Not free, not huge. Whether you can use it depends on one thing only, whether you know the application exists.
Why that letter matters more than it looks
It is not a refusal. It creates no duty and gives you no rights. But it lands in the applicant's hands while the application is still soft. Their attorney reads it and does one of three things. Trims the goods list so it stops touching your class. Withdraws and refiles narrower. Or carries on and hopes nobody is watching.
Two of those three end with a mark that no longer overlaps yours. The third ends with a registration you have to attack afterwards, through cancellation, where the office fee for a decision in contentious proceedings is 1,000 PLN and the timeline is counted in years rather than months.
That is the case for a watch. Not because a letter would save you. Because the other side gets a letter and you get a clock.
Where this sits next to the neighbours
Czechia deleted the office's own relative check in 2019 and put nothing in its place, which I went through in the Czech piece. Slovakia kept one narrow duty, a warning about an identical sign for identical goods before publication, and nothing at all for lookalikes, covered in the Slovak piece.
Poland is the strangest of the three. The office still does the search. It just posts the result to the wrong party.
What to actually do
Watch the Polish register for marks in your classes and read the goods lists, not only the names. A swapped letter, a prefix on the front, a redrawn device, those are exactly the shapes a similarity search picks up and a human reading a brand name alone will miss.
Our Poland watch runs at 9 USD a month, the same as Czechia and Slovakia, with the full country list and prices on the pricing page. For the longer version of how a watch sits beside your attorney instead of replacing them, the comparison page lays it out.
Sources
- Industrial Property Law of 30 June 2000, consolidated text Dz.U. 2023 poz. 1170, Articles 146(1)(2), 146(1)(6), 152(17)(1) and 255.
- Act of 11 September 2015 amending the Industrial Property Law, Dz.U. 2015 poz. 1615, in force from 15 April 2016.
- UPRP, Podstawy sprzeciwu. Przewodnik, chapters on the move from the examination system to the opposition system.
- UPRP applicant information page on the grant procedure, step four, notification about similar or identical earlier marks.
- UPRP fee table under the Regulation of the Council of Ministers of 8 September 2016, Dz.U. 2016 poz. 1623, items 18 and 19.
- UPRP opposition procedure page on the 3 month deadline and the settlement period of 2 months, extendable to 6.