Category: Commentary

The School Education Law that was issued last month is a substantive piece of legislation that covers all aspects of school education: from the establishment of schools and the admission of students, to the rights and duties of faculty staff. An interesting provision in this key Omani law is found in article 77 stipulating that the Ministry of Education owns copyright over the books and curriculums prepared by the ministry. This is a deviation from article 4(a) of the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Law which excludes official government documents from copyright protection. This new provision in article 77 of the School Education Law will limit the ability of teachers, students, and parents to fully utilise these textbooks without providing any benefits to the Ministry of Education.

As can be seen from our overview post of the new Omani Maritime Law, this law is massive and makes many changes to the way the maritime industry is governed. In this post, we will highlight five key changes introduced by this major legal instrument:

The legal implications of generative artificial intelligence—such as ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney—are countless: From privacy issues relating to the processing of personal data without the permission of users, to civil and criminal liability of the information generated by these tools. However, one of the most interesting legal issues is the extent to which these new technologies conflict with copyright law, especially as AI tools such as ChatGPT have made it extremely easy to create what appear to be new works based on information freely available on the internet. The question here is simple: Do the works produced by ChatGPT violate the copyright protection of the underlying works from which ChatGPT obtained its information? Spoiler alert: Under Omani Copyright Law, the answer is yes.

Just before the end of business last Thursday, the Sultanate issued its first ever royal decree pertaining to the rapidly-developing field of hydrogen. Royal Decree 10/2023 Allocating Some Lands for the Purposes of Renewable Energy and Clean Hydrogen Projects is the first of its kind, earmarking sizable parcels of land purely for these projects.

The Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs recently published last month in the Official Gazette a brand new Regulation on the Supervision of Lawyers, Law Offices, and Civil Law Firms regarding Anti-money Laundering and Counter-terrorist Financing. This regulation is part of a suite of regulations that the Omani government issued last month to comply with the latest recommendations made by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). This particular regulation updates the regulation from 2021 covering the same topic. Failure to comply with the new regulation exposes lawyers, law offices, and civil law firms to penalties including fines up to 100,000 Rial Omani and the suspension of their licences.

The Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Investment Promotion (MOCIIP) published in this week’s issue of the Official Gazette a regulation governing the activities of marketing and promotion on internet websites and social media that requires social media influencers to register with the government and requires all companies using their service to verify the existence of a licence before dealing with them. The new regulation enters into force in 90 days and imposes fines of up to 1,000 Rial Omani.

The TRA published on Sunday this week a brand new Regulation Governing Domain Names. This regulation makes a number of important changes that open up the domain name market by providing a mechanism for allowing companies with no connection to Oman to register <.om> domain names and permitting the transfer of the registration of domain names between registrants without any apparent restrictions. The regulation also attempts to make the WHOIS system for <.om> domain names compatible with the Personal Data Protection Law that is due to enter into force early next year. This post provides an overview of some key aspects of this new regulation.

Back in June 2022, I had predicted that Oman would pledge to achieve net zero by 2050. What I had not predicted was how soon this pledge would come. As you have probably heard by now, Oman has, in the lead-up to COP 27, pledged to achieve net zero by 2050.

This is fantastic news—it demonstrates Oman’s commitments to the objectives of the Paris Agreement and will most certainly galvanise its government and the private sector towards achieving this goal. However, it is also a daunting task that requires a fundamental rethink on how we use energy. Oman will have to take many unprecedented steps to fulfil this laudable goal, so how does it go on about it?

The National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI) published last week the legal framework for the governance of public sector data in the form of a National Data Strategy. Even though the name does not sound like it, the National Data Strategy is a legal instrument equivalent to secondary level legislation exactly identical to a regulation issued by a ministerial decision. This legal instrument governs the whole life cycle of public sector data, provides a framework for the exchange and release of this data, and establishes a system for the designation of national base registries for key public sector datasets, among many other things. This post highlights some of the key concepts found in this strategy.

The Omani judiciary had a major overhaul last week with Royal Decree 35/2022 which re-constituted the Supreme Judicial Council, abolished the administrative court, and brought the Public Prosecution under the supervision of the judiciary. This significant development is part of the efforts of Sultan Haitham to re-structure the Omani government, which had previously included a major restructuring of the executive branch of the government and has now addressed the judiciary.