Those products are as follows:

• Household electric storage water heaters
• Household electric room heaters
• Household electric cooling devices
• Household air conditioners
• Electric ovens
• Cigarettes

For a foreign company to obtain the Quality Certificate, it must first have a Foreign Company Branch registered in Iraq.

For more information, please contact iraq@qumsieh.com.

Under the pilot programme, applicants whose claims have been examined by SAIP or the EPO may request accelerated processing of their corresponding patent application.

The two offices will share existing work results and data, enabling the offices to make use of each other’s work. This should lead to reduced efforts, increased efficiency, and reduced costs for users.

For more information, please contact saudi-arabia@qumsieh.com.

As for pending patent applications and issued patents, EGPO has granted IP agents a time allowance until 28 February 2022 to add such applications into the new electronic system.

Accordingly, any patents with the 20th annuity due this year must be inserted into the new online portal.

Other application procedures and fees remain unchanged.

For more information, please contact egypt@qumsieh.com.

Patent annuities are due for all applications filed for at least one or more years where the annuity fees have to be paid retroactively for all previous years calculated from the PCT application date.

Below are the fees as announced by the Ministry’s office.

For more information, or for our detailed schedule of charges, please contact kuwait@qumsieh.com.

Filing and Renewal
The Registrar maintained his decision to discontinue prosecution for all pending trademark applications filed prior to his appointment despite several negotiations and meetings to change this decision.

After several rounds of negotiations with the Registrar, he finally insisted that all applicants must re-file their applications if they wish to maintain their rights because the previously filed applications were not processed with a request for examination.

Please note that to register a trademark in Iraq, it is obligatory to lodge a request for examination for trademarks before filing an application. If the examination result is positive, applicants may submit an application for registration accompanied with the examination report where the application will then be accepted and proceed to publication immediately. More about this procedure can be found here:
https://njq-ip.com/newsletters/2017/08/iraq-updates-on-examination-and-other-procedures/

An applicant can relate the re-filed application based on its older pending application in order to protect its right of ownership against applications filed during the period that falls between the original application date and the newly re-filed application date by third parties.

Any applications that are due to renewal, but their registration certificates are not issued yet, it will be mandatory to re-file such applications instead of filing a renewal application.

Please note that the above decision was made orally and there is no written decree for that matter, and this will be effective on application numbers between 50,000 and 72,000.

Recordals of Change
The Registrar has reinstated some articles in the Trademarks Law with respect to the recordals of change, namely, recordals of assignment, change of name, change of address, mergers, as well as renewals.

Any change to the trademark as above must be published in the Official Gazette after the payment of the official fees of IQD200,000 (approximately $180), and then, the registration certificate of the relevant recordal will be issued 30 days after the publication date.

Said practice will be effective on all pending recordal applications as well as new applications.

If you need more clarifications, please contact iraq@qumsieh.com.

Therefore, it is not possible to file new applications for registration or renewal applications. Pending filing procedures will be halted too.

For more information, please contact iraq@qumsieh.com.

The official filing fees for new applications as well as the official publication fees for the same remains unchanged, while the increase affects the registration fees only. Also, the official publication fees for the renewal applications stay still, as the new tariffs affect the official renewal fees only. The official fees for recordals were not affected.

It is not clear whether the new fees will have a retroactive effect on pending applications or not. However, we shall prepare and submit a petition to the Registrar requesting that pending marks were filed prior to the increase decision and shall, therefore, not be subject to the increase. But, this does not guarantee the outcomes.

Finally, our professional fees shall remain unchanged.

Should you need more clarifications, please contact saudi-arabia@qumsieh.com.

The required details are as follows:

1. Scientific name of the product;
2. Trade name of the producer;
3. Pharmaceutical formula of the product;
4. Name of manufacturing company if not the applicant, and
5. Name of local distributor, if any.

Said decision is effective immediately.

For more information, please contact iraq@qumsieh.com.

Increase in the Official Fees
Pursuant to Ministerial Decree no. 65 of 2016 approving the Implementing Regulations of the GCC Trademark Law, the official fees for trademark related matters have increased effective 29 May 2016.

The new official fees for filing one trademark in one class through issuance of the final registration certificate have increased from USD320 to USD1723.

The increase affected all services provided by the BTMO retroactively, meaning that it will be applied on all pending files as well as new matters.

In this regard, publication fees should be paid within 30 days from the date of issuance of the acceptance notification, otherwise the application will deemed as abandoned.

Our new schedule of fees will reflect the increase to the official fees only.

Online Publication of Accepted Trademark Applications
The BTMO has introduced new publication procedures according to Article 11 of Executive Regulations of GCC Trademark Law issued with the decision No. 65/2016, having the accepted trademark applications published every Thursday on the official website of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism (www.moic.gov.bh) and will stop issuing hardcopies in the Official Gazette which belongs to the Ministry of Information Affairs.

Such publications will contain the details of each accepted trademark application, transfers of ownership, recordals of name changes, recordals of address changes, changes of representative agent, and approved recordal of mergers.

The first online publication was issued on 2 June 2016. The opposition period is now 60 days from the date of publication with the payment of the prescribed fees.

For more information, please contact bahrain@qumsieh.com.

 
For more information please, please contact info@qumsieh.com.