Exclusive right granted by the state to the inventor to protect technical innovations.
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Protection of the exterior appearance of a product — shape, lines, colours, and texture.
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Visible sign which serves to distinguish products or services of one enterprise from others.
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Intellectual property protection granted to authors of original literary and artistic works.
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Specialist patent and legal document translation by expert teams across SEA languages.
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IC layouts, plant varieties, trade secrets, domain names, and general legal counseling.
Learn more →On 27 July 2026, the Government issued Decree No. 298/2026/ND-CP providing for the functions, tasks, powers and organizational structure of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. This Decree takes effect from 28 July 2026 (Decree 298). Under this Decree, the Copyright Office is renamed as the Department of Cultural Industries and Copyright.
Following the relaxation of security control requirements for patents under the 2022 Law Amending and Supplementing a Number of Articles of the Law on Intellectual Property (the IP Law), the 2025 Law Amending and Supplementing a Number of Articles of the IP Law, effective from 1 April 2026, further relaxes the security control requirements for patents, specifically by no longer requiring an applicant to file the first domestic patent application before being permitted to file a corresponding patent application abroad. Instead of filing the first domestic patent application, where an invention/utility solution is subject to security control, the applicant now only needs to file a request for license to file a patent application abroad (foreign filing license) with the Ministry of National Defense or the Ministry of Public Security. In addition, the scope of inventions/utility solutions subject to foreign filing license has been narrowed, now applying only to inventions/utility solutions falling under the list of state secrets. These amendments, in particular the removal of the requirement to file the first domestic patent application before filing a patent application abroad, represent significant progress, reducing the time, effort and cost for rights holders whose inventions/utility solutions are subject to security control but who have no need to file a patent application in Vietnam. Set out below is a summary of certain amendments relating to this requirement.
On 31 December 2025, Vietnam’s instrument of accession to the Hague Convention of 5 October 1961 Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents (the Apostille Convention – the Convention) was deposited with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands – the Depositary of the Convention – and notified to the Contracting States. Under this arrangement, the Apostille Convention will officially take effect for Vietnam and will apply between Vietnam and the Contracting States that have accepted this accession as from 11 September 2026. To guide the implementation of the Convention, the Government issued Decree No. 293/2026/ND-CP dated 23 July 2026, which takes effect in Vietnam as from 11 September 2026. This Decree clearly provides that a public document of a Contracting State having accession relations with Vietnam which has been issued an Apostille certificate by the competent authority of that Contracting State shall be exempt from consular legalisation and may be used in Vietnam without any further certification procedure under the relevant law. Agencies and organizations in Vietnam may not require any further consular certification or consular legalisation procedure for a public document that has already been issued a valid Apostille certificate.