The most recent Amendment to Vietnam’s Law on Intellectual Property was passed by the National Assembly on 16 June 2022. Except for a few provisions, the Amendment will take effect from 1 January 2023. The changes are relatively extensive and below are some of the main ones concerning patents and industrial designs:
Security Control of Inventions
A new Article 89a has been added to formalize some security control provisions which were previously implemented by way of a Government Decree. Specifically, a patent application for an invention in a technical field affecting national defense and security, which was created in Vietnam and which belongs to an individual who is Vietnamese citizen and permanently residing in Vietnam or an entity established under Vietnamese law, can only be filed abroad if it has already been filed in Vietnam to carry out security control procedures. In other words, compared to the previous Government Decree, the scope of the new Article 89a is limited to a specific category of inventions affecting national defense and security. Read more