Intellectual property rights owners are increasingly feeling the pressure from the counterfeit goods that are invading the global market. Societies worldwide also suffer, as countless people are either slaves to these criminal black marketers or victims of their faulty products. The second part of this two-part feature takes a look at some of the economic and social problems posed by counterfeiting and other IP rights violations.
April 5, 2020
Under Vietnam’s intellectual property law, patent protection is available for both inventions and utility solutions. Both must meet novelty and industrial applicability criteria to qualify for protection, but utility solutions, unlike inventions, do not need to prove an inventive step. They must simply be “not ordinary knowledge.” As the patentability criteria are less stringent, the term of protection for a utility solution is not as long as for an invention.