As provided in Article 42 of the Intellectual Property Law, at any time an application is pending with the Department but before DIP has granted an industrial design thereon, and before the abandonment, final rejection, or other termination of proceedings on the application, the applicant may amend/divide the application, provided that any such amendment/division shall not change the essential appearance of an industrial design, that is, within the disclosure in the initial application.

An application may be divided into one or more divisional applications by filing one or more subsequent applications that make reference to the application being divided. The second or subsequent application shall be identical to the application on which it is based and shall be accompanied by a statement that the newly filed application is a division of such earlier application, which shall be identified by its filing number, title, name of designer, and filing date. Both the newly-filed application (or applications) and the earlier application shall be amended to restrict their claims to contain only a single industrial design, as appropriate, or a group of such related items as to meet requirements for the relevant form of intellectual property such as unity of industrial design. Such amendment may be filed with the divisional application or within 60 days thereafter.

Amended after registered/granted

The Lao IP Law only permits the correction of errors related to name, address or the applicant’s name and address according to the template form provided by DIP found in the publication of a patent after it has been granted. Correction requests must be made within 60 days of the date of publication and DIP shall record all changes in the database, document the registration and publish in the official gazette for the registration of industrial property.

After the industrial design has been registered, an industrial design owner may submit a request to modify partial information in the documents related to the registration. As for the modification of some errors in the registration application file due to the applicant by filing a request according to the template form from DIP as well as paying the service charge, DIP may allow for a minor modification only. DIP shall publish the information related to such a modification on the official gazette for industrial property registration.