Morocco is embarking on one of the most comprehensive overhauls of its intellectual property framework in decades, as the Moroccan Office of Industrial and Commercial Property — known by its French acronym OMPIC — launches a deep revision of the country’s foundational industrial property legislation, Law 17-97, and its implementing regulations.
The reform is being carried out under the Swiss PartnershIP Morocco project, a bilateral development cooperation agreement between the Swiss and Moroccan governments funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs to the tune of 1.5 million Swiss francs. A legal expert will be commissioned to produce concrete amendment proposals, ready for legislative adoption.
The case for reform is clear. Although Law 17-97 has been updated over the years, Morocco’s legal framework has not kept pace with the realities of a digitalized global economy, the emergence of new forms of innovation, or the obligations arising from international treaties recently ratified under the auspices of the World Intellectual Property Organization — including the Riyadh Design Law Treaty, the Patent Law Treaty, and the Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources, and Associated Traditional Knowledge.
The reform is structured around four strategic pillars. The first targets the substantive protection regime for patents, trademarks, industrial designs, geographical indications, and appellations of origin, with plans to introduce utility models for lower-complexity innovations, provisional patent applications, and clarified rules on well-known marks. The second pillar focuses on procedural modernization — streamlining filing deadlines, notification rules, and administrative processes to make the system more accessible and attractive to users.
The third axis addresses the professionalization of industrial property advisors, the intermediaries between inventors and the administration, by tightening qualification requirements, clarifying professional conduct rules, and introducing a strengthened code of ethics with enforceable sanctions. The fourth and most innovative pillar concerns rights enforcement, aiming to reduce dependence on lengthy and costly court proceedings by introducing mediation as an alternative dispute resolution mechanism.
Challenges remain substantial. Transposing international treaty obligations into domestic law requires careful calibration — too rigid an approach risks implementation failures, while too loose a transposition undermines the reform’s purpose. Legislative coherence across overlapping texts, meaningful stakeholder consultation, and rigorous impact assessments will all be essential to the process.
Scheduled to run through 2026 and 2027, the reform carries a straightforward ambition: to develop an industrial property framework that tangibly improves conditions for investment and innovation in Morocco — and positions the kingdom as a regional leader in the protection of creative and economic value.
