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On June 16th, 2022, Law on amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Intellectual Property Law of Vietnam (hereinafter called “the Law”) was ratified by the National Assembly, which will take effect on January 1, 2023, except for a few provisions. Highlight parts regarding patent, utility models and industrial design including:
• The Law focuses on providing certain mechanism/provisions for creation, registration (the Applicant – ruling unit – empowerment policy), exploitation and dissemination of patent, utility model and industrial design for national scientific and technological tasks funded by the State’s budget and confidential inventions;
• The opposition action procedure is officially adopted, along with Article 112 on the opinion of the third party, gives the chance to third party for submitting an opinion about the application. However, this procedure has a time limit, namely:
– Any third party can file the opposition action against the patent application within nine (9) months from the publication date;
– The time limit is four (4) months for the industrial design application counted from the date of the application is published.
• One key amendment is that the industrial design patent application can be late published according to requests of the Applicant at the time of filing and the period of suspension is seven (7) months from the filing date.
• The Law also provides new definition of the term “industrial design” including mentioning to component parts of complex products, in particular “Industrial design is appearance of a product or component parts of complex products, expressed in shapes, lines, dimensions, colors or any combination thereof and visible through exploitation of products or complex products’ function”.
In an effort to institutionalize the economic strategies of the governing party, comply with international treaties and conventions, overcome visible limitations and shortcomings which are disclosed over 17 years of the implementation of the Intellectual Property Law in Vietnam, the Law of June 16th, 2022 is expected to promote the rules and enforcement, efficiency and auspiciously enable the relevant parties to reach the high and equal protection of their legal rights in Vietnam.