1. Context and Effective Date

1.1. Overview of the new intellectual property legal framework

Three crucial legal documents including Law No. 131/2025/QH15, Decree No. 100/2026/ND-CP, and Circular No. 10/2026/TT-BKHCN have created a comprehensive transformation in the intellectual property sector in Vietnam. All of these documents officially take effect on the first of April 2026. These changes not only directly impact the procedures for establishing rights to inventions, industrial designs, trademarks, and geographical indications but also reshape the entire approach to commercialization and rights enforcement within the context of robustly developing digitalization and artificial intelligence technology.

1.2. Impact on business operations

The synchronization of the three aforementioned documents brings a direct and profound impact on the operational methods of all types of enterprises. These legal changes require the internal governance systems of businesses to operate at a higher speed and with greater precision to meet the shortened timelines. Comprehending each new detail and preparing adaptive strategies is a mandatory requirement for every organization currently participating in business activities to optimize the value of intangible assets and prevent potential legal risks.

2. Notable General Changes of Broad Application

2.1. Promoting the commercialization of intellectual property rights and the transaction price database

For the first time in the legislative history of intellectual property, Vietnam officially acknowledges the mechanism for establishing an intellectual property rights transaction price database under Article 9d of Decree No. 100 of 2026 issued by the Government. This is an electronic data system designed uniformly nationwide. The core function of this system is to gather and store all information regarding the value of lawful transactions related to intellectual property rights. This database aims to publicize ownership transfer contracts, licensing agreements, mortgage contracts, and capital contribution agreements using intellectual property assets.

This information system encompasses vital data fields such as detailed information about the participating subjects, the type of transaction executed, the actual financial value of the transaction, and the accompanying commercial conditions. The establishment of the transaction price database brings immense practical significance to the business community. Enterprises will have an additional official and reliable reference data source to conduct the valuation of intellectual property assets. This data source also serves as a foundational role helping organizations design financial structures for mergers and acquisitions and demonstrate the value of intangible assets to credit institutions during the process of mobilizing capital, contributing capital, or mortgaging for business loans.

2.2. Intellectual property objects created with artificial intelligence and the criterion of significant human contribution

In the context of outstanding digital technology development, Decree No. 100 of 2026 issued by the Government supplemented Article 10 to detail industrial property objects including inventions and industrial designs created with the assistance of artificial intelligence systems. Under this breakthrough regulation, inventions and industrial designs are only eligible for state protection when humans can prove their own significant contribution to the creation of those objects.

The law sets forth extremely stringent quantitative standards to evaluate the level of contribution. A human is only considered to have made a significant contribution upon simultaneously performing all core activities. The first activity is clearly defining the problem to be solved, which must encompass the foundational idea of the solution rather than merely describing the general problem. The second activity is directly selecting the input data, establishing objectives, setting constraints, and defining technical parameters entirely based on personal creative ideas, absolutely not relying entirely on automatic suggestions from machines. The third activity is the process of evaluating, selecting, refining, testing, and interpreting the results generated by artificial intelligence. Therein, the refinement part must be decisive, completely altering the core structure or function of the initial result to create a new practical value. The fourth activity is the human making the final decision to select the result constituting the object seeking protection. Concurrently, a person with a significant contribution meeting all these standards will be considered the genuine author by the law in accordance with the provisions of the Intellectual Property Law. It is important to note that for trademark objects created with the assistance of artificial intelligence, the law still considers granting a protection title normally if that object fully meets the general protection conditions.

2.3. Shortening numerous processing timelines and response deadlines

Circular No. 10 of 2026 issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology continues to implement administrative reforms by shortening a series of procedure processing deadlines. The deadline for applicants to respond to opinions on the substantive examination results for industrial design registration applications has been shortened from three months down to only two months. The deadline to respond to notices of intended refusal of requests to amend or supplement applications has also been sharply reduced from two months to one month. Furthermore, the mandatory deadline for applicants to complete the payment of the protection title granting fee has decreased from three months to two months. The direct impact of this regulation compels businesses to tighten the management of deadlines, optimize the internal coordination process with intellectual property representative organizations, and standardize all evidence dossiers early to avoid the risk of missing deadlines leading to the loss of rights.

2.4. Eliminating the decision on valid application acceptance following formal examination

To optimize the workflow, instead of issuing a decision accepting a valid application in physical paper format as before, the intellectual property authority will transition entirely to a weekly periodic publication mechanism. The list of registration applications scheduled for publication will be continuously updated on the official electronic information portal, accompanied by clear identification parameters such as the application number, the valid application filing date, and the anticipated date assigned for publication in the gazette. The profound significance of this change is to maximize the reduction of unnecessary administrative procedures, saving costs for the state. However, in return, businesses need to assign personnel to regularly monitor the publication portal to update their application status precisely on time in order to prepare for the subsequent examination stages.

2.5. Filing date determination for electronic submissions outside standard business hours

The new guiding circular has specified the principle for determining the filing date for online dossier submission methods. If the applicant performs the dossier submission through the electronic system after standard business hours or on weekends, rest days, public holidays, or Lunar New Year holidays according to labor law regulations, the official filing date recorded by the system will be the immediately following consecutive working day. The practical recommendation provided is that when submitting dossiers close to the final deadlines, especially sensitive deadlines related to priority rights or the risk of coinciding dates with competitors, enterprises need to proactively submit dossiers early during standard business hours so as not to miss the desired filing date.

2.6. Expedited substantive examination mechanism for inventions and trademarks

Decree No. 100/2026/ND-CP has added an exclusive mechanism which is the request for expedited substantive examination. This mechanism allows shortening the substantive examination time down to only about three months, accompanied by extremely strict approval conditions.

For invention registration applications, this mechanism only applies to solutions directly related to national strategic technologies such as next generation telecommunications networks, or emergency situations serving security, national defense, natural disaster prevention, and epidemic control. This mechanism also opens opportunities for inventions that have been successfully deployed for commercial exploitation in reality.

For trademark registration applications, the request for expedited examination is approved by state agencies if that trademark is attached to goods produced according to inventions belonging to the list of strategic technologies or serving emergency situations. Businesses can also apply this mechanism if the trademark protection title is a mandatory document required by functional agencies to issue specialized business operation licenses. To execute this procedure, the applicant must directly submit the dossier at the management agency, all goods and services must meet stringent conditions, while completely excluding a number of particularly complex trademark types such as collective trademarks, certification trademarks, or three dimensional trademarks. In the event the dossier fails to meet sufficient conditions or unexpectedly encounters an opposition dispute from a third party, the dossier processing procedure will automatically revert to the standard examination timeline.

3. New Points on Industrial Designs

3.1. Nonphysical products definition and styling characteristics

The 2026 legislation has expanded the scope of protection for industrial property objects by officially recognizing the designs of nonphysical products. A nonphysical product is clearly defined as an object that does not exist in a tangible material form, but is created through lighting technologies, displayed on electronic surfaces or the surrounding spatial environment including the air. To be eligible for protection, this object must necessarily possess practical functions for humans to operate, interact directly, or perform a specific technological task.

The core styling characteristics of a nonphysical product may include the combination of graphic shapes, color patches, spatial layouts, dimensional proportions, the sequence of changing display states, and the synthesized visual effects of graphic elements.

3.2. Note on protection limitations

Although the scope of protection has been significantly broadened to encompass creations within the digital environment, the law still establishes clear boundaries. Specifically, information content that changes according to user behavior such as pure text paragraphs or statistical data sequences is generally never considered essential styling characteristics. Moreover, certain specific creative objects such as digital font sets remain completely excluded from the scope of industrial design protection.

4. New Points on Trademarks

4.1. Evidence of the right to use personal images in trademark registration

Circular No. 10 of 2026 issued by the Ministry of Science and Technology has supplemented extremely rigorous regulations regarding documents proving the right to use personal images when submitting trademark registration applications. If the trademark sample uses the portrait image of another person, the applicant is obligated to provide a document expressing formal consent and the relevant civil agreements from that person. This includes agreements on the payment of remuneration if the image is used for commercial exploitation purposes, unless the parties have a different written agreement. Even in the case where the applicant uses their own portrait image, that person may still be required to submit an accompanying copy of an identity document with a photo to prove their identity, except for cases where the state management agency possesses sufficient infrastructure capability to access and directly crosscheck data from the national population database.

4.2. Mechanism for voluntary exclusion of partial exclusive rights over signs

A highly flexible new mechanism applied is the right to voluntarily declare exclusion. Applicants are now empowered to proactively issue a declaration of not claiming exclusive protection for one or multiple constituent elements within the trademark sample if those elements bear a general descriptive nature or lack distinctiveness.

During the substantive examination process, if the applicant does not issue a waiver declaration or does issue one but that declaration is evaluated as unreasonable, the management agency will issue an official notice clearly stating the mandatory elements that must be excluded and stipulate a specific time limit for the applicant to submit a response opinion. It is particularly noted for international trademark registration applications filed through the Madrid system designating protection in Vietnam, if the forwarded dossier lacks appropriate exclusion declarations conforming to national standards, the intellectual property agency possesses full authority to issue a decision on provisional refusal of protection right before the twelve month deadline under the Madrid mechanism.

4.3. Evaluating the distinctiveness of two letter signs

The technical professional criteria to evaluate the distinctiveness of trademarks have been clarified much more comprehensively. For trademark samples comprising solely a sign constituted by two letters, the examination criteria are tightened in the direction that if the combination of those two letters cannot be pronounced into a complete meaningful syllable in Vietnamese, or does not form an independent recognized vocabulary word in popular global languages such as English and French, then that sign carries a very high risk of being considered by the state agency as lacking distinctiveness and being refused the grant of a title.

4.4. Nonrecognition of transfer when the protection title is terminated, invalidated or expired

For the purpose of cleaning up the property rights transaction market, dossiers registering industrial property rights transfer contracts will automatically be refused resolution by the management agency if the core object of the transfer contract is a protection title currently in a state of having been terminated in validity, having been entirely invalidated, or having officially expired its protection term according to the law. The greatest significance of this regulation is to enhance absolute legal safety for the bona fide transferee, helping to maximally mitigate the risk of spending money to purchase intangible assets that no longer retain any commercial value on the market.

4.5. Amending protection titles suspension mechanism and request withdrawal

The administrative procedure for resolving requests to amend the contents of protection titles is supplemented with a new control mechanism permitting the suspension of dossier processing. This suspension will be executed following a written request from competent functional agencies or in instances where that intellectual property right is being utilized by the owner as a secured asset in lawful civil transactions. Concurrently, the procedure allowing the voluntary withdrawal of amendment requests is also regulated extremely strictly, wherein it affirms the immutable principle of not permitting the applicant the right to restore the initial dossier status after having validly executed the request withdrawal procedure.

5. New Points on Enforcement and Procedures

5.1. Database on protection and infringement of intellectual property rights

Alongside the data platform serving the purpose of asset valuation, the state management agency will directly invest in building and operating a specialized national database concerning the protection status and rights violation history. This central system stores all detailed information regarding dispute cases and infringement acts that have been processed by functional agencies. The data includes the classification of infringed rights, violation processing results, the status of executing punitive measures in reality, and relevant professional information during the investigation process. Information regarding the lawful operational status of intellectual property rights representative organizations is also updated continuously to establish a transparent and reliable search platform for the entire society.

5.2. Application of technology and artificial intelligence in monitoring and processing infringements in the digital environment

The new legal corridor has created a solid foundation permitting the robust application of advanced automated technologies into law enforcement activities. Functional agencies are authorized to deploy intelligent management systems to completely automatically detect and monitor acts showing signs of rights infringement in cyberspace.

Within the assigned jurisdiction, this technological system assists the management agency in issuing requirements forcing intermediate service providing platforms to swiftly remove infringing contents. Concurrently, the system allows the immediate application of urgent technical measures to suspend or restrict the activities of violating accounts.

5.3. Forcible distribution or noncommercial use: conditional differentiation by commodity group

The system of remedial measures for infringing goods has been stringently refined, introducing a clear distinction regarding the application conditions between the group of trademark counterfeit goods and the group of geographical indication counterfeit goods alongside other rights infringing goods.

Most notably, for the trademark counterfeit goods group, permitting distribution or use for noncommercial purposes is now solely considered by the law as an extremely rare exception. This exception is only allowed to be activated when executing the mandatory destruction measure causes severe harms to the ecological environment or threatens public health, and functional agencies must be able to provide reports convincingly proving that. If there is an absence of credible environmental protection evidence, the measure of entirely destroying the volume of trademark counterfeit goods will become a mandatory requirement devoid of negotiation.

5.4. Authorization duration and written requirement upon termination

Administrative procedures concerning the legal validity of authorization documents are regulated much more strictly. If the content of the power of attorney established by the parties does not specify a concrete effective time period, the authorization duration will automatically be determined by the state agency based on the default provisions of the current Civil Code.

When any party harbors the desire to unilaterally terminate the authorization contract prior to the committed deadline, that party is obligated to submit an official formal termination notice enclosed in the dossier. Some instances where the power of attorney records specific conditions such as only terminating when there is a termination document or when there is a legally replacing new power of attorney can also be interpreted by the state agency as having determined the authorization duration correctly according to regulations.

5.5. Complaints and complaint resolution: narrowing the subjects and reestablishing the examination procedure

The new regulations possess an adjustment leaning towards narrowing the scope of administrative decision documents capable of becoming lawful subjects of complaints. Especially, the legal system has supplemented a mechanism to reestablish the examination procedure, bringing immensely vast convenience to applicants. Under this breakthrough mechanism, if the result of the entire complaint resolution process leads to the management agency being compelled to amend, supplement, or cancel a portion or the entirety of an erroneously issued administrative decision previously, the intellectual property agency will automatically activate the function to reestablish the corresponding examination procedure precisely at the stage where the error occurred. This helps process the remaining workflow steps seamlessly in exact accordance with the complaint resolution conclusion content without forcing the enterprise to redo the dossier from the beginning.

6. Recommendations for Enterprises and Rights Holders

6.1. Reviewing the intellectual property asset portfolio and managing deadlines

The event of the new legal system officially commencing operations with a series of reduced timelines demands that the enterprise leadership board immediately initiate internal review campaigns. Enterprises need to conduct an inventory of the entire intangible asset portfolio including trademarks, inventions, industrial designs, copyrights, and plant variety rights, alongside dossiers currently in the submission process at state agencies to update the exploitation strategy and rigorously manage the final deadlines for workflow processing.

6.2. Standardizing the internal legal evidence system

With increasingly strict regulations, standardizing the legal evidence system must be considered a strategic priority. The marketing and communications department needs to construct a methodical process for collecting and storing documents of consent permitting the use of personal commercial images and authorization dossiers. Particularly for technology enterprises, technical dossier systems must be redesigned methodically to document in detail the entire process of human contribution when applying artificial intelligence technology systems to serve as a basis for protecting lawful rights.

6.3. Leveraging the expedited examination mechanism

Enterprises should proactively submit dossiers requesting the application of the expedited examination mechanism when research projects fully meet the priority conditions. However, enterprises need to conduct a thorough professional assessment regarding potential arising risks such as the danger of encountering opposition or disputes from competitors before deciding to activate this mechanism to avoid having the dossier pushed back to the standard examination timeline route causing a waste of resources.

6.4. Enhancing the capacity to monitor online infringements and preparing an enforcement plan

Enterprises need to invest in developing their own automated monitoring mechanisms in cyberspace. Preparing in advance the forms requesting the removal of violating content, perfecting the process of collecting digital evidence through bailiff documentation activities, and establishing a network for regular collaborative communication with functional rights protection agencies will assist enterprises in protecting their market share in the most proactive manner.

Conclusion

The modification of the legal system from the Law, Decree to the Circular simultaneously taking enforcement effect from the first of April 2026 has generated a comprehensive change in the picture of intellectual property asset management in Vietnam. The new legal framework bears the characteristic of regulating swifter processing procedures but accompanied by the pressure of extremely short response deadlines, and the scope of protection is flexibly expanded especially for nonphysical products and artificial intelligence technology. Concurrently, strict requirements regarding internal risk management, the capacity to store a robust evidence system, and strategic thinking in commercializing intangible assets have become more paramount than ever before.

The business community should perceive this powerful legislative alteration as a highly appropriate golden juncture to proceed with comprehensively restructuring the intellectual property management strategy. Upgrading internal asset management processes and maximally leveraging new preferential support mechanisms will help enterprises both firmly safeguard core rights and optimize the capability to exploit intangible knowledge values, thereby creating a sustainable and potent competitive advantage in practical business operations.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not replace professional legal advice. For support tailored to your situation, please contact HMLF lawyers.

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