Insights

Editor’s note (24 September 2026): as of publication we have not located an official announcement of the measures described below; this article is based on industry briefings and is subject to official confirmation.

On 5 August 2026, IP Vietnam introduced procedural changes for international trademark registrations designating Vietnam under the Madrid System. For provisional refusals issued through WIPO, the system will now provide one automatic three-month extension without a separate form or official extension fee. The measure addresses a persistent practical problem: delayed transmission of refusal notices could leave applicants with a very compressed period in which to appoint local counsel and prepare a response.

IP Vietnam has also opened a dedicated electronic channel allowing local representatives to submit responses to Madrid provisional refusals directly into the examination system, bypassing part of the traditional paper-based routing. The new route is expected to shorten review completion by roughly two to three months. The extra time should reduce deadline pressure, but applicants should not treat it as a reason to wait: early coordination with Vietnamese counsel remains important, particularly where evidence, specification amendments or substantive arguments may be required.

On 5 August 2026, recent TÜRKPATENT decisions and practice updates signalled a tougher approach to filings that copy foreign brands. Even where an overseas mark has not yet been registered or used in Türkiye, an application reproducing its distinctive wording, design or other features as an “identical copy” may support an inference of bad faith when the duplication cannot reasonably be explained as coincidence. In such cases, the foreign rights holder may no longer need direct evidence of the applicant’s subjective intention for the filing to be rejected on bad-faith grounds.

The practical shift matters most to brands that entered the Turkish market late or have not yet filed locally. It moves part of the evidentiary focus from proving what the applicant intended to showing how improbable the copying is as an independent creation, potentially making opposition and invalidation arguments easier to build. The boundary between an identical copy and ordinary similarity will still depend on subsequent decisions, so the development should not be read as an automatic bad-faith finding for every close mark. Early filing remains the safer strategy, backed by records of brand creation, overseas use, publicity and any circumstances showing how a filer could have encountered the original brand.

This article updates our report of 27 July, “Saudi Copyright Reform Rewrites AI Training and Platform Liability”.

Saudi Arabia’s new Copyright Law is due to take effect on 12 August 2026, replacing the 2003 regime. Based on Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property (SAIP) materials and pre-effective-date compliance alerts, the reform brings AI training, software licensing and online content distribution into a more explicit copyright framework. The provision drawing the closest attention from technology businesses is a statutory AI-training exception, under which certain data scraping and copying for algorithm development may be permitted when specified safeguards, including protection of right holders’ interests, are satisfied.

The law also gives clearer legal force to click-wrap and shrink-wrap end-user licence agreements and brings streaming distribution within the scope of the making-available right. Companies operating AI products, software, SaaS or content platforms in Saudi Arabia should therefore treat 12 August as a practical review point for data provenance, training workflows, EULA presentation and content-licensing chains. The AI exception creates useful room for development, but its conditions matter; it should not be read as a blanket copyright exemption for training datasets.

Regional IP industry briefings published on 5 August 2026 point to a concentrated round of reform across the Middle East, spanning design classification, trademark border enforcement and examination practice. The United Arab Emirates is approaching the effective stage of its accession to the Locarno Agreement, prompting practitioners to assess how fuller use of the international design classification system may standardise cross-border filing practice. In Saudi Arabia, the recently introduced Tahaqaq digital platform is bringing customs trademark enforcement and registered-rights information into a more connected workflow, giving brand owners a new tool for anti-counterfeiting work.

Iraq, Palestine and other jurisdictions are also reporting procedural and examination updates that appear to move parts of regional practice closer to more developed GCC standards. The practical message is broader than any single rule change. Businesses filing designs should review classification and portfolio consistency earlier, while trademark owners may need to connect registration data, customs measures and digital enforcement processes rather than manage them separately. Greater regional alignment can reduce some friction, but effective dates, platform procedures and examination details remain jurisdiction-specific; a single Middle East playbook would still be premature.

The 2026 amendments to ARIPO’s Banjul Protocol took effect on 1 March, but the operational impact is becoming clearer as practitioners work under the revised framework. Two points now deserve particular attention in portfolio management. Designated states have a six-month window to communicate acceptance, conditional acceptance or refusal following substantive examination, with an application deemed accepted where no communication is made within the prescribed period. That shorter timetable changes how applicants and counsel should monitor national-stage developments across ARIPO designations.

Cost control has also become more granular. Under the 2026 fee schedule, a list of goods exceeding 50 words in a class attracts an additional US$10 for each word beyond that threshold. Long specifications copied from other filing systems can therefore create unexpectedly large surcharges. The practical response should not be indiscriminate shortening: applicants need to review classification, commercial coverage and word count together before filing. ARIPO’s latest rules are now less a technical amendment than a day-to-day discipline in deadline tracking and specification drafting.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has published a final rule that will take effect on 13 August 2026 and apply to petitions filed on or after that date. Requests involving abandoned patent applications, patents expired for non-payment of maintenance fees, delayed priority or benefit claims, and certain missed Hague international design deadlines will face added scrutiny once the delay exceeds one year. Petitioners will need to explain the circumstances in detail and show that the entire period of delay was unintentional; the previous threshold for this additional showing was two years.

The rule does not remove the possibility of reinstatement or increase the existing fee amounts, but it moves both the higher petition-fee tier and the more demanding evidentiary threshold forward by a full year. In practice, one year now becomes a sharper risk boundary. Rights holders should review abandoned files, maintenance-fee lapses and broken priority chains early, while preserving docket records, internal correspondence, staffing changes and the timeline of corrective action. A petition assembled long after the event is far harder to support with a coherent record.