Patent Filing Procedures under GCC Patent Office

The Gulf Cooperation Council was formed in 1981 in Abu Dhabi by Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, UAE, and KSA (founding members). According to the GCC Charter, its main objectives are:

The GCC Patent Office was settled in 1992, and it is located in Riyadh (KSA) within the Secretariat General of the GCC. In its twentieth session in November 1999, the Supreme Council revised the GCC Patent Regulation (accepted by the Council in the 13th session detained in December 1992). According to article 2 of the GCC Patent Regulation (the Regulation), to qualify for a patent according to the provision of this Law, an invention must be: new, involve an inventive step, and industrially applicable. Furthermore, it must not conflict with the Sharia Law or general rules in the GCC States. According to this Regulation, the following must not be regarded as inventions (Article 3):

As per Article 5 of the Regulation, the patent application (PA) must contain:

Patent-Filing-process

Once the application has satisfied the terms before stipulated, the Office must register the application filing date and formally examine it. The Office may demand that the applicant completes the application requirements within three (3) months at most from the date he was informed. If he fails to do so within the specified date, his application must prescribe. If the application has satisfied the terms specified in the Regulation, the Office must decide to concede the patent, enter it in the register, and announce it. The patent certificate must be delivered to the owner of the invention three months from the announcement date should any concerned party submit no objection to the Grievance Committee. IP protection aims to safeguard not only new inventions or creations but also those that are still in existence and any legal queries in this regard may be addressed by intellectual property lawyers.

The patent allows its owner to exploit the invention. The invention of a product must be considered controlled by use, manufacturing, sale, or exhibition for sale. When the Patent subject is a product, the Patent owner must have the right to prevent others from using, importing, manufacturing without his prior consent. The patent owner must make sufficient exploitation of the patented invention in the Member States within three (3) years from the date of funding. According to the Regulation, The Compulsory license must be cancelled in the following cases:

Concerning the fees, the patent must be subject to a yearly fee paid in advance at the start of each year beginning from the year next to the request filing date. Should the patent proprietor fail to pay such charges within a maximum of three months from the starting of the year, he may do so within another three months, starting upon expiry of the previous one. In such a case, an extra fee shall accrue. And the Office must collect fees from the beneficiaries in the following instances:

In 2016 was introduced online patent filing services in the GCC Patent Office; the process was simplified as follows:

Filing-Process circle graph

Recently, The Supreme Council of the GCC, following the 41st meeting, announced that the GCC Patent Office has stopped accepting new patent applications from January 6, 2021. Customers with current or future interest in patent protection in the GCC Member States are advised to continue as follows: