Cap. 417 Art. 91Claimtopriorityof Convention application.

(1) A person who has duly filed an application for protection of a design in a state which is a member of the World

Trade Organisation or a party to the Paris Convention, hereinafter in this Act referred to as a "Convention application", or his successor in title, has a right to priority, for the purposes of registering the same design under this Act for which such an application has been filed, for a period of six months from the date of filing of the first such application.

(2) If the application for registration under this Act is made within such six-month period:

(a) the relevant date for the purposes of establishing which rights take precedence shall be the date of filing of the first Convention application, and

(b) the registrability of the design shall not be affected by any use of the same in Malta in the period between that date and the date of the application under this Act.

(3) (a) Any filing in a state member of the World Trade Organisation or party to the Paris Convention which is equivalent to a regular national filing under its domestic legislation, shall be treated as giving rise to the right of priority.

(b) For the purposes of this subarticle "regular national filing" means a filing which is adequate to establish the date on which the application was filed in that country, whatever may be the subsequent application.

(4) A subsequent application concerning the same design as the first Convention application, filed in the same Convention country, shall be considered the first Convention application (the filing date of which is the starting date of the period of priority), if at the time of the subsequent application:

(a) the previous application has been withdrawn, abandoned or refused, without having been laid open to public inspection and without leaving any rights outstanding, and

(b) it has not yet served as a basis for claiming right of priority, and the previous application may not thereafter serve as a basis for claiming a right of priority.

(5) Provisions may be made by regulations as to the manner of claiming a right to priority on the basis of a Convention application.

(6) A right to priority arising as a result of a Convention application may be assigned or otherwise transmitted, either with the application or independently.