By the Lê & Lê Patent & Design Team                    16 March 2026

The Law on Intellectual Property, as amended in 2025 (the “amended IP Law”), will come into effect on April 1, 2026. The key amendments relating to patents and industrial designs are summarized below.

Definition of industrial designs

The definition of industrial design is amended to:

An industrial design means the external appearance of the whole or a part of a product in physical or non-physical form, embodied in shapes, lines, colors, or a combination of these elements, and visible in the process of exploiting the utility of a product.

Grace period for disclosures of designs

An industrial design shall not be considered to have lost its novelty if it is publicly disclosed by the person entitled to register it or by a person who obtains information about the design directly or indirectly from that person, provided that the application for the design is filed within 6 months from the date of disclosure.

Shortening the examination periods

Design applications shall be published in the Industrial Property Gazette within 1 month from the date on which they are accepted as to form.

The substantive examination periods for invention applications and design applications are shortened from 18 months to 12 months and from 7 months to 5 months, respectively.

The time limit for requesting substantive examination of an invention application is reduced from 42 months to 36 months.
 
In addition, in certain cases, as will be specified in detail by the Government, the substantive examination of invention applications may, upon the applicant’s request, be accelerated to within 3 months.

Shortening the opposition periods

The time limit for any third party who believes that the invention or design should not be patented to file an opposition is 6 months and 3 months from the publication date, respectively.
For invention applications under the accelerated examination procedure, the opposition period is only 3 months.

Additional grounds for invalidation

The amended IP Law expands the grounds for invalidation of patents and designs, namely:  

- A patent will be invalidated in whole if the inventor/creator named in the patent is not the person who has directly created the invention/design.

- A design patent will be invalidated in whole or in part if there is violation of the first-to-file principle.

Transitional Provisions

Applications filed before April 1, 2026, shall continue to be processed in accordance with the legal instruments in effect at the time of filing, except for the following matters, which shall be governed by the provisions of the amended IP Law:

- The formality examination of applications that have not yet been accepted as to form.

- The time limit for opposition to applications published from April 1, 2026.

- The time limit for substantive examination of applications published from April 1, 2026.