A new policy on intellectual property is about to take effect

The law, passed by the National Assembly at the end of 2025, includes three articles, adjusting the content of copyright, industrial property rights, plant variety rights and the protection of these rights. Applicable subjects are organizations and individuals both at home and abroad.

An important change in the Law is to shorten application processing time, expand the scope of protection to non-physical products and promote commercial exploitation of intellectual property.

According to the National Office of Intellectual Property, the new Law significantly shortens the processing time of industrial property applications, simplifies procedures for establishing and registering rights, and provides regulations to ensure the implementation of new deadline requirements.

The law also sets out a framework to support the creation and commercial exploitation of intellectual property rights, with a view to turning these rights into profitable assets. The owner is allowed to use intellectual property rights in civil, commercial, investment transactions, to contribute capital or mortgage loans.

The law expands the scope of protection to a number of new groups. Industrial design protection now applies to both integral parts of products and non-physical products, such as graphical user interfaces (GUI) and icons. Copyright and related rights are also protected for cable signals carrying encrypted programming.

The law provides regulations to handle a number of issues arising from the development of technology, notably issues related to artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Management agencies are also supplemented with sanctions to handle violations of rights in the digital environment, improving the effectiveness of intellectual property rights protection activities.

According to the National Office of Intellectual Property, the amendments are assessed to have a significant impact on the entire process of establishing and protecting intellectual property rights.

The law overcomes current limitations such as complicated procedures for granting intellectual property rights, long processing times, while regulations are not deterrent enough, the scope of protection is still narrow, and old regulations have not been able to handle problems arising from new technology trends. Activities to create, protect and exploit intellectual property rights are therefore more convenient.

Sharing about the Intellectual Property Law amended at the end of 2025, Minister of Science and Technology Nguyen Manh Hung said that the law aims to turn intellectual property into economic assets of businesses, which can be valued, bought and sold, recorded in financial statements and become collateral for loans. The focus shifts from the “rights protection” mechanism to “assetification – commercialization – marketization” of research results.