Brazilian Patent office publishes roadmap proposal of IP Law reform

Is Brazil in need of an IP reform? A decade ago, the question would have drawn little interest worldwide; today it is hard to ignore. Brazil is one of the world's ten largest economies, and although growth has cooled under high interest rates, it is steadily outgrowing its long-standing identity as a commodity exporter to become a large and increasingly sophisticated consumer and technology market - one attracting tens of billions of dollars in direct investment. Global innovators no longer treat the country as peripheral.

The shift is especially visible in intellectual property. In an April 2026 UC Berkeley Center for Law and Technology webcast on Brazil's patent landscape observed that patent cases have climbed from one or two a decade ago to roughly fifty in a single year, that the patent-litigation bar has grown from around fifteen practitioners to more than seventy, and that Brazilian companies have begun asserting their own patents abroad. A patent system built around a commodity economy is now being asked to support innovation-led growth, and stakeholders are increasingly asking what, if anything, should be modernized (full episode at https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/bclt/bclt-legal-analysis/brazil-patent-landscape/

Brazil's Industrial Property Law, Law No. 9,279/1996, turned 30 in May 2026. The Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (National Institute of Industrial Property – INPI but referred to here as the BRPTO), has released a report titled Proposals to Improve the Industrial Property Law (https://www.gov.br/inpi/pt-br/central-de-conteudo/noticias/inpi-divulga-relatorio-com-propostas-de-aperfeicoamento-da-lpi).

The report gathers suggestions made by BRPTO and its technical group, with the purpose of supporting debates on possible amendments to the statute.

This policy roadmap identifies which issues the BRPTO considers ripe for statutory amendment, which issues may be handled through regulations, ordinances / guidelines, and which proposals require further study or should be rejected for the time being. The report covers patents, trademarks, industrial designs, geographical indications, technology-transfer agreements, appeals, administrative nullity proceedings and general procedural rules.

This distinction matters. Brazil's IP reform debate is not only about whether the scope of protection should be expanded or narrowed. Much of the report is about administrative design: how to make BRPTO procedures faster, more predictable and better adapted to electronic prosecution, while preserving legal certainty and traditional patent-law safeguards.

Institutional context: reform as part of a broader efficiency agenda

The reform initiative sits within a wider modernization program. Earlier in 2026, the BRPTO stated that the LPI's 30th anniversary made it timely to assess whether the law remains adequate for Brazil's goals in the coming decades. The same theme appears in the operational agenda: patent and trademark timelines are now discussed together with digitalization, staffing, budget predictability and the need for a more internationally aligned office.

The report therefore forms part of a broader move toward procedural modernization. But it does not recommend change at any cost. Many proposals are accepted only for administrative regulation, while others are rejected because they could undermine secrecy periods, legal certainty, established patent concepts or the practical distinction between patent disclosure and confidential know-how.

Patents: the center of gravity

Patents are the most detailed part of the report. The BRPTO received 114 internal patent-related responses, which were broken down into 165 individual proposals. Of those, 17 subjects, corresponding to 97 proposals, were accepted for amendment of the LPI; 17 subjects, corresponding to 27 proposals, were reserved for infralegal regulation; 5 subjects, corresponding to 15 proposals, require further study; and 12 subjects, corresponding to 26 proposals, were rejected.

The accepted patent proposals are largely procedural, but several could have significant strategic consequences for applicants. They concern priority claims, PCT priority restoration, divisional applications, double patenting, examination-request mechanics, patent letters, annuities, restoration and powers of attorney. The report's most important message is that the BRPTO wants statutory text where legal certainty requires it, but prefers flexible administrative instruments for technical examination practice.

Key patent proposals in the BRPTO report

Issues left open: AI, software and divisionals

Some of the most sensitive issues were not accepted or rejected outright.

Artificial intelligence is one example. The BRPTO recognizes the relevance and complexity of proposals to expressly prohibit AI from being named as inventor or patent owner, but recommends additional study before definitive statutory language is adopted. That cautious approach is consistent with the BRPTO's existing legal position: in 2022, the agency's Specialized Federal Attorney's Office stated that artificial intelligence could not be named as inventor in a Brazilian patent application under the current LPI, the Paris Convention and TRIPS.

Computer programs are another open question. The BRPTO treats proposals to allow patent protection for computer programs as requiring deeper study and debate, due to concerns over legal certainty and alignment with technological development. Likewise, the patent office is open in principle to limiting voluntary divisionals to earlier stages, but flags the legal complexity of doing so, especially in light of Article 33 of the LPI.

The picture changes, however, once attention shifts from the statute to examination practice. In parallel with the report's call for further study, the BRPTO has moved more decisively at the administrative level: in August 2025 it issued draft guidelines for examining AI-related patent applications, open for public consultation through October 2025. On the very question the report leaves open - AI inventorship - the draft guidelines take a clear position. Output generated autonomously by AI, where a person did little more than trigger the system, is not patentable; an AI-assisted invention can be, but only where a natural person made a genuine intellectual contribution - for instance, defining the technical problem, configuring the system toward a specific goal, selecting among AI-generated candidates, or validating and translating the results into a concrete solution. That approach aligns Brazil with the international consensus reflected in the EPO's DABUS decisions, the UK Supreme Court's ruling that an inventor must be a person, and the USPTO's 2024 requirement of a significant human contribution to each claim.

For biopharma and agrochemical applicants, the draft guidelines carry sharper consequences on enablement and inventive step. In silico results - binding scores, virtual-screening rankings or generative outputs - risk being treated as speculative unless the specification provides experimental data or a credible rationale showing why the claimed compounds or formulations plausibly achieve the asserted effect; and claims directed merely to datasets, training data or the model itself are excluded as presentations of information, so claims are better framed around the applied technical process. On inventive step, the draft makes clear that the analysis turns on the technical effect of the claimed subject matter, not on the fact that AI was used; and as AI tools come to be treated as part of the skilled person's toolbox, applicants will increasingly need to show - and document - why a human-guided result was not obvious. Taken together with the report, the message is consistent: Brazil is prepared to modernize how AI inventions are examined well before it settles the statutory questions the report defers.

Industrial designs: adapting protection to digital and partial designs

Industrial designs are another major focus. The report identifies as priorities the modernization of the definition of industrial design, reconsideration of the industrial-manufacture requirement, and express protection for partial designs. It also proposes revisiting the current system for filing variations, possibly replacing it with a related designs model, and allowing searches before registration to reduce the need for ex officio administrative nullity proceedings.

The design proposals are closely tied to digital markets. The report links reform of Article 95 to protection for non-physical objects, including metaverse products, holograms, dynamic graphical interfaces and augmented-reality interfaces. The report also proposes harmonizing several 180-day periods into six months, echoing the international design-law harmonization agenda. WIPO's Riyadh Design Law Treaty, adopted in November 2024, similarly aims to streamline and simplify procedures for industrial design protection.

Trademarks: opposition reform and non-traditional marks

The trademark proposals are heavily driven by speed. The report considers reform of the opposition system a priority because approximately 90% of trademark applications reportedly receive no opposition. The contemplated change would accelerate examination of those unopposed applications.

Other priority trademark proposals include allowing sound marks, reducing the non-use cancellation period from five years to three years, adding loss of distinctiveness as a ground for cancellation, and modernizing filing requirements to accommodate non-traditional marks.

Geographical indications: international alignment and export strategy

For geographical indications, the central priority is to revise Articles 176-182 of the LPI to align Brazil's GI system with international practice, TRIPS and the Lisbon framework. The report frames this as a way to facilitate exports and provide stronger international protection for Brazilian GIs.

Other GI priorities include regulating the use of geographical indications as ingredients in transformed products, improving technical specifications, establishing additional requirements for particular market segments, and clarifying geographic delimitation through cartographic and geographic elements.

Technology-transfer agreements and general provisions

The technology-transfer section is narrower. The report identifies one issue that may require amendment of the LPI: the 30-day deadline for the BRPTO to decide on recording or registering technology-transfer, franchise and similar agreements. Rather than extending that deadline to 90 days, the report proposes keeping the 30-day period but starting the clock only once the administrative record is complete.

The report also considers some issues appropriate for infralegal treatment, including improvements to license offers, annotations related to IP rights and contracts, and the agency's general autonomy to regulate contract-recordal procedures administratively.

On general provisions, the report treats Article 217 as a priority. The concern is representation of parties domiciled abroad, especially in light of the Madrid and Hague systems, where the absence of a Brazilian attorney may create practical problems in judicial service of process.

Biotechnology deserves special attention

One of the most commercially important threads in the report is biotechnology. The proposals concerning biological sequences, extracts, microorganisms, peptides and genome-edited plants arrive at a time when Brazil is also taking steps to strengthen its international biotech patent infrastructure.

In June 2026, Brazil issued Decree No. 13,011/2026, enacting Brazil's accession to the Budapest Treaty on the international recognition of microorganism deposits for patent purposes. In practical terms, the treaty can reduce cost and bureaucracy for patent applications involving microorganisms by allowing deposits recognized across treaty members. Taken together, the Budapest Treaty development and the report's biotech proposals suggest that Brazil is revisiting both the formal infrastructure and the substantive boundaries of biotech patent protection.

Conclusion

The BRPTO's report is a good guidance for a broader debate of the IP reform. It identifies targeted statutory amendments, reserves technical issues for administrative regulation, and leaves the most controversial questions for further study.

That approach is both cautious and significant. It suggests that the next phase of Brazilian IP reform may be less about ideological change and more about building a faster, more predictable and internationally aligned system.

However, it the proposed reform ambitious enough to show Brazil role in incentivize innovation for the decades to come?

Brazil's economy - and, increasingly, its own innovators - have outgrown a patent system built for a commodity exporter. The thirtieth anniversary of the LPI is an opportunity not just to make the existing system faster, but to actively incentivize innovation and put a more sophisticated set of protections on the table.

Three measures stand out. The first is a patent term adjustment mechanism: since the Supreme Court struck down the sole paragraph of Article 40 in 2021, Brazil has had no way to compensate patentees for time lost to examination delay, even though obtaining a granted patent still routinely takes several years.

A calibrated adjustment for office-caused delay - standard in the United States and other leading systems - would restore effective patent life without reviving the open-ended extension the courts rejected.

The second is implementing meaningful regulatory data protection for pharmaceuticals: Brazil's regulatory data-protection regime remains inapplicable pharmaceutical and biologic test data, leaving a gap relative to most of its trading partners and weakening incentives for the life-sciences investment the country is courting.

The third is stronger enforcement at the border: Brazil's statutory right to injunctive relief already makes it one of the most patentee-friendly litigation forums in the world, but that strength is not yet matched by robust customs and border measures against infringing goods.

None of this requires abandoning the balanced, public-interest tradition of the LPI; it requires building on it. Thirty years on, the right question is not only how to make Brazil's patent system faster, but how to make it worthy of the innovation economy the country could become.