Insights

Brazil’s INPI has recently disclosed that its industrial design area increased decisions by 106.6% in 2025 and is moving into a new upgrade cycle for 2026. The package includes a dedicated industrial design coordination structure, an expansion of first-instance examiners from 5 to 8 and second-instance examiners from 1 to 2, plus AI-supported prior-design search and automation projects. On INPI’s own public target, the median time for first-instance technical examination is being pushed down to 9 months, signaling a shift from a largely registration-style workflow toward a more search-driven, efficiency-oriented, and predictable examination model.

As the EU design reform moves toward its second implementation phase, the coming differences between Member States are starting to matter as much as the harmonised EU text itself. The new framework does three things at once: it further clarifies the repair-space treatment of spare parts, it pushes design infringement analysis upstream from physical copies to 3D-printing files and related software or digital media, and it broadens design-law language around non-physical and dynamic subject matter. For businesses, this is not merely a definitional update. It is a structural rearrangement linking after-sales repair, platform governance, digital product strategy, and filing practice in a single compliance map.

What will decide commercial exposure, however, is not only what the EU has already written. It is how national laws will translate those principles into local conditions. Will the repair clause come with a tougher consumer-information burden in some jurisdictions? How will pre-8 December 2024 spare-parts rights be treated during the transition period? And when the claimed design shifts from car body panels, chairs, and lamps to virtual décor, metaverse furniture, or visual assets marketed alongside NFTs, will examiners focus mainly on the digital token, or on how the underlying product and appearance are characterized? These questions are beginning to push the design reform story away from a pure harmonisation narrative and toward a competition over national implementation logic.

Around 21 April 2026, Côte d’Ivoire-based startup Mewi Capital announced that its financial- and stock-market education board game, Drassy, had obtained an invention patent from the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI). For a company built around financial education as a market-access problem, this is more than a branding milestone. It means that the innovation embodied in its rules architecture, teaching mechanics and product expression has, at least in this instance, secured a unitary layer of protection across OAPI’s 17 member states.

The development matters because it touches one of patent law’s most sensitive borderlines. In many major jurisdictions, pure game rules, mental-act rules, business methods and teaching logic often struggle to clear subject-matter eligibility unless they are framed through a sufficiently technical implementation. That is why the Drassy grant should not be read simply as “game rules are patentable in OAPI.” A more careful reading is that this case may illustrate a workable space—between formal exclusions and real-world grant practice—in which technical character, system-level implementation, productisation and claim drafting can materially change the outcome.

On 10 April 2026, the China National Intellectual Property Administration issued its 2026 Intellectual Property Administrative Protection Work Plan, laying out the year’s priorities across twelve areas including rules, source-level protection and administrative adjudication of patent disputes. Over the past several days, the plan has been read across the market as a practical map of China’s enforcement and examination posture for 2026: on one side, bad-faith trade mark filings, stockpiling and patent applications that violate the principle of good faith are being pushed into earlier-stage governance; on the other, the digital economy, artificial intelligence, quantum technology and brain-computer interfaces are being pulled into the core service range of protection centres and rapid-rights mechanisms.

What makes the document important is not that it repeats a generic promise to “strengthen protection.” It is that it puts administrative enforcement, credit sanctions, rapid protection and examination-quality signals into the same annual framework. Read together with the Patent Examination Guidelines revisions that took effect this year and the tighter practical climate around design filings, the message is that 2026 will not be defined only by what happens after infringement breaks out. It will be defined far earlier, at the filing gate, in the treatment of bad-faith behaviour, and in how quickly credible rights can be turned into enforceable protection.

In mid to late April 2026, the Delhi High Court’s ruling in the “MARQ / MARC” dispute kept an interim injunction in place against Flipkart and sent a clear signal to the market: even where goods are sold mainly through e-commerce channels, small differences between competing signs will not save a defendant if the overall visual, structural and phonetic impression is still likely to confuse ordinary consumers. The Court’s reasoning is especially important for digital commerce because it treats search results, product tiles, thumbnail-led browsing and quick-click buying paths as settings in which overall impression matters more than fine-grained comparison.

At roughly the same time, the Court’s handling of disputes involving the TIGER logo and artistic elements in packaging and labels brought a parallel enforcement route into sharper focus. A company logo, label or packaging face is not only a trade mark asset; where it contains original artistic expression, it may also attract independent protection as an artistic work under copyright law. For brand owners in India, the practical lesson is that digital-market enforcement is increasingly moving away from a single-track trade mark story and toward a combined strategy of trade mark similarity, copyright claims, platform evidence and early injunctive relief.

The UK Intellectual Property Office launched its new One IPO digital patents services for the public on 1 April 2026. According to the IPO, the new service brings patent filing, patent management and patent renewal into a single digital entry point, allowing users to work through one IP account to view the status of UK patents, submit applications online, make certain administrative changes through self-service and renew rights digitally. In practical terms, the UK patent system is moving away from a cluster of separate procedural touchpoints and toward a more unified account-based service architecture.

It would be too narrow to treat this launch as nothing more than the replacement of an old interface with a new website. The more important development is that the IPO is gradually placing filing, notices, updates, renewals and ongoing patent administration inside one account logic. For businesses, patent attorneys and cross-border innovators, that is not merely a user-experience improvement. It is a signal that procedural organisation, compliance rhythm and internal responsibility allocation may all need to be redesigned around a different operating model.