An overview of Patent Process in UAE & GCC

Filing a patent application in UAE or GCC Patent Office must be based on several steps and criteria, through this article we will explain in brief the general patent process in UAE Patent Office and GCC Patent Office.

Overview

 A patent, the oldest form of intellectual-property protection, is a legal document giving, for a set time, a monopoly on making, using and selling an invention.

Patents were first issued in the Arab world in 1916 in Morocco, followed by Lebanon in 1924, and most of the rest of the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s.

The GCC Patent Office, in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, provides a centralized system for obtaining protection in all six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Since the office was established in 1998.

The process

“The applicant should have a clear vision of the marketing area of his invention and he should carefully select the regions in which he can succeed.

Local applications are filed at the UAE Patent Office in Abu Dhabi, where patent protection is granted for inventions deemed novel, inventive and useful.

UAE patent applications must be filed in English and Arabic, accompanied by supporting documents, including power of attorney, an assignment where the applicant is not the inventor, and a commercial license (in cases where the applicant is a commercial entity).

Applications with same filing requirements in UAE can be also filed at the GCC Patent Office, which gives protection that is valid in all six GCC countries.

When an application has been filed in the UAE or the GCC office, it is examined for compliance with a technical- specification format, including the technical background and description of any drawings. The application then receives a filing number and the filing date is secured. A search report is prepared to check whether the invention is new and unique, and substantive examinations are carried out by engineers and experts. If the local Patent Office does not have the required expertise, the application is sent to partners at the Austrian Patent Office.

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