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Iran overhauls IP system

Peter Ollier, Hong Kong

Iran’s parliament has approved a new law that will overhaul the country’s IP regime by introducing provisions for industrial designs, substantive examination of patents and tougher criminal penalties for IP infringement, and amending the trade mark system

The Iranian parliament passed the Patents, Industrial Designs and Trademarks Act on January 22 2008 and the government published it on April 20.

Seyed Kamran Bagheri, head of the IP department at the Research Institute of Petroleum Industry in Tehran and a partner at New Way Intellectual Property and Technology Institute, told Managing IP that the introduction of civil and criminal penalties for patent infringement is the most important part of the new law, but that it also contains a series of other important changes.

These include a new IP right for industrial designs and committing the patent office to introduce substantive examination of patent applications. At present, the Iran IP Office (IIPO) only examines applications that have not been registered in other jurisdictions.

“This is a very big step for the Iranian IP system – it was not possible to use the previous system as the law was so old,” Morteza Revapour, a lawyer for New Way Intellectual Property and Technology Institute told Managing IP.

Alireza Laghaee of Dr Laghaee & Associates International said that in the area of trade marks, the law allows people to challenge trade marks on the grounds of non-use, introduces a new opposition procedure and increases the time limit for appealing decisions of the IIPO from 10 days to two months.

The civil and criminal parts of the law came into effect on May 5, while IIPO has until January 22 2009 to produce implementing regulations for the other provisions.

Bagheri said the Iranian parliament has also approved the country joining the Patent Cooperation Treaty, but that formal accession would wait until the IP Office had built sufficient capacity.