Deliberate disclosure of the substance of a patent or design application (Art. 157⁴)

Will the fine be 1,000 lari or 3,000 lari?

Part 1 of Article 157⁴ sets a range — 1,000 to 3,000 lari — not a single fixed amount, so the figure is settled in the decision itself. Because the law leaves room inside that range, the circumstances you put forward, and the documents supporting them, can affect where in it the fine lands.

I disclosed my own pending application. Am I liable under this article?

No. The text expressly excludes disclosure by the applicant or the applicant's successor in title, so Article 157⁴ does not reach that act. It says nothing, however, about consequences that may arise under other legislation, and those should be checked separately.

What counts as a repeat offence here?

Part 2 applies to the same act committed repeatedly within one year of the imposition of an administrative penalty, and raises the fine to between 3,000 and 5,000 lari. If more than a year has passed since that penalty was imposed, the basis for applying part 2 falls away, which makes the exact date of the earlier penalty a point worth verifying.

The information came out after the bulletin publication. Does the article still apply?

Article 157⁴ covers only the period before Sakpatenti publishes the data about the application in the official bulletin. Once publication has taken place, the act the article describes can no longer be committed, so the publication date is one of the first facts to establish.

Does this article give me compensation for what the disclosure cost me?

Article 157⁴ provides for a fine and does not deal with compensation for loss. Recovering damages is a separate claim brought on separate grounds, and it is normally planned alongside the administrative case rather than after it.

4 min·22 Aug 2026

What Article 157⁴ actually covers

When an application for a patent, or for the registration of a design, is filed with Sakpatenti, the technical or design solution described in it is not yet public information. It becomes public at one defined moment: when Sakpatenti publishes the data about that application in its official bulletin. Article 157⁴ of the Georgian Code of Administrative Offences protects the window between those two events. Deliberately disclosing the substance of the application during that window is a separate administrative offence.

The article is not aimed at the applicant. Its text expressly carves out disclosure by the applicant or by the applicant's successor in title. If the person who filed the application, or the person to whom the rights passed, chose to make the solution public, Article 157⁴ does not reach that act. In a real file, two questions decide the outcome: who disclosed the substance, and when.

The sanction the article sets

Article 157⁴ has two parts, and each carries its own range of fines.

Part 1 — deliberate disclosure of the substance of the application before the data about it is published in the official bulletin: a fine of 1,000 to 3,000 lari.
Part 2 — the same act committed repeatedly, within one year of the imposition of an administrative penalty: a fine of 3,000 to 5,000 lari.

Both parts state a range rather than a single fixed figure, so the exact amount is settled in the decision itself. That matters more than it first appears: the question is not only whether the act happened, but how it is assessed inside the boundaries the law allows. It also matters that the repeat limb is bounded in time. The text ties it to one year from the imposition of an administrative penalty, so the date on which the earlier penalty was imposed is a fact worth establishing precisely.

"Deliberate" is the load-bearing word

The article describes the disclosure as deliberate. That single word reshapes the whole case, because the enquiry is not only into whether information travelled, but into whether the disclosure was conscious. An accidental leak, a technical error, or information a third party worked out independently present a different factual picture from the one the article describes. Where this charge is brought, the evidence of intent is usually where the argument lives, and it is usually documentary.

The article does not list categories of people either. It describes an act and excludes exactly one group — the applicant and the applicant's successor in title. Everyone else is defined by what they did rather than by the role they hold, so the question in a real file is factual: did this person deliberately disclose the substance of a pending, unpublished application. That framing is why such cases so often turn on the paperwork governing access to the filing — engagement terms, confidentiality clauses, internal handling rules — rather than on recollection.

Updated: 14 Nov 2026

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