The Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BPTO) presented, on January 29, 2026, its activity planning for 2026 regarding Trademarks and Industrial Designs.
The main objectives of the BPTO for this year are the enhancement of its operational capacity and the modernization of procedures, with a view to reducing the decision-making time in Trademark and Industrial Design proceedings, including the following initiatives:
Industrial Designs (ID):
⇒A tool for image search based on artificial intelligence is under development, which will allow more accurate and faster searches. The expectation is that, in the future, substantive examination will be implemented for all ID applications, which would depend on an amendment to the Brazilian Industrial Property Law, which currently provides for examination only upon request (Article 106).
⇒Review of registrability requirements, for example, by relaxing the functionality criterion. Currently, the Brazilian Law prohibits the registration as an industrial design of an object whose shape is determined essentially by technical or functional considerations (Article 100, item II).
With the measures above, the BPTO seeks to harmonize the Brazilian system for the protection of industrial designs with international practices and to encourage the filing of ID applications by Brazilian companies.
Trademarks:
⇒Review of the procedure for the protection of Position Marks, currently considered by the BPTO to be excessively rigid and inadequate, in view of the low number of trademark registrations of this nature (only three). The examination of position marks is currently suspended until the procedure is reviewed and reformulated.
⇒Acceleration in the examination of trademark registration applications, including measures such as:
Ξ Expansion of the BPTO’s staff, scheduled for the second half of 2026, granting the BPTO greater operational capacity.
Ξ Automated actions for process clearance, such as the publication of office actions in trademark applications whose applicant has an inactive or cancelled corporate taxpayer registration, with the aim of reducing the backlog of pending cases.
Ξ Incentives for simplified opposition (a measure currently in force), aiming to reduce the amount of time required from by the BPTO examiners for the analysis of facts and arguments.
With these measures, the BPTO expects to increase the number of trademark applications decided per year (440,000 decisions in 2025 and an estimated 540,000 in 2026) and to reduce the waiting time in the examination queue.
Watch the full presentation at the following link.
