The 4 Types of Intellectual Property in Nepal: Trademark, Patent, Design & Copyright (2026)

Nepal recognises four kinds of intellectual property. The Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act, 2022 (1965) covers three of them — patents, industrial designs and trade marks — at the Department of Industry. Copyright is the fourth, under a different statute and a different office.

Key takeaways

• One statute, the Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act, 2022 (1965), covers patents, designs and trade marks together.
• Its Nepali title is पेटेण्ट डिजायन र ट्रेडमार्क ऐन, २०२२, and 2022 in Bikram Sambat is 1965 in the Gregorian calendar.
• Copyright is outside that Act entirely, under the Copyright Act 2059 (2002) and the Nepal Copyright Registrar's Office.
• Three rights go to the Department of Industry; the fourth does not, and IP Sewa offers no copyright service.
• Terms differ sharply: a trade mark is renewable without limit, a patent twice, a design twice.
• Trade marks are published in the Industrial Property Bulletin; patents are published in the Nepal Gazette.
• Nepal is first-to-file for all three registered rights, so the earlier application usually wins.

Which four rights does Nepal actually recognise?

A trade mark protects the sign that tells a customer whose goods these are. A patent protects an invention that works in a new and useful way. An industrial design protects how a product looks. Copyright protects an original creative work.

Those four are not interchangeable, and picking the wrong one is the most expensive mistake on this page. A patent will not stop a competitor using your shop name.

This guide matches assets to rights, and rights to offices. For the underlying concept and the Nepali vocabulary, read our companion piece on what intellectual property law means in Nepal.

Which of them does the Patent, Design and Trademark Act cover?

Three. The title of the Act is the list of what it covers, and the Department of Industry administers all three under that one law.

Copyright is deliberately absent. That separation changes which building you walk into, which statute governs a dispute and which ministry the office reports to.

What does a trade mark protect?

The badge of origin, and only the badge of origin. Under Sec. 16 of the Act, title to a trade mark is acquired on registration with the Department, which is what makes Nepal a first-to-file country in practice.

A mark can be a word, a logo, a stylised name or a combination, used by a firm, a company or an individual. It must distinguish your goods from somebody else's, which is why a purely descriptive word struggles.

Registration is also class-based. Sec. 18A requires a separate application for each category of goods or services, so a brand used on packaged food and in a restaurant is two filings rather than one.

What does a patent protect?

A working invention, judged against two tests rather than three. Sec. 5 asks whether the patent is a new invention and whether it is useful to the general public, and the Act never uses the words "inventive step", "obvious" or "prior art".

Examiners and advocates still apply a real standard in practice, so treat the statutory wording as the floor rather than the whole picture.

The subject matter is functional: a mechanism, a process, a technical method that produces a result. Our patent registration service and the guide to what can be patented in Nepal both start from that distinction.

What does an industrial design protect?

Appearance, and appearance only. A design registration covers the shape, pattern or ornamentation of an article, and says nothing about how it works.

That makes the drawings the whole application, because the views you file define what you claim.

Small manufacturers under-use it, though buyers often choose a product off a shelf on looks alone. Our industrial design filing service and the explainer on design rights in Nepal cover the practical side.

What does copyright cover, and who administers it?

Original creative expression: books, songs, films, photographs and software. The governing statute is the Copyright Act 2059 (2002), administered by the Nepal Copyright Registrar's Office under a different ministry.

Copyright protects expression, not the idea underneath: an app's written code can be a copyright work while the commercial idea behind it cannot.

IP Sewa does not offer a copyright service, so we will point you at that office instead. Keep dated drafts and written agreements with freelancers; ownership disputes are usually evidence problems.

Which office do you go to for each right?

Three doors lead to the same building and one leads elsewhere. The table below is the shortest honest summary.

The publication column surprises people more than the office column. Much writing claims patents appear in the Industrial Property Bulletin, and the word "bulletin" does not appear in the Act at all.

How long does each right last?

A registered trade mark runs seven years from the date on its registration certificate under Sec. 18D, and Sec. 23B allows renewal for seven years at a time with no overall ceiling.

A patent also runs seven years, but Sec. 23B limits renewal to twice, a ceiling of twenty-one years. A design runs five years and is likewise renewable not more than twice, so fifteen in all.

That asymmetry catches people out. Our renewal date calculator places the dates from a registration date, and the renewal service handles the filing if you would rather not diarise it.

Where is each registered right published?

Trade marks and designs are published by the Department under Sec. 21A, and it is trade mark publication that fills the Industrial Property Bulletin. Publication opens the opposition period: a published trade mark can be opposed within 90 days, so act before the DoI's stated last day.

Patents take a different route. Sec. 7A publishes a registered patent in the Nepal Gazette, so searching a bulletin for one always comes up empty. Our published trade mark search covers those bulletins and nothing else.

Which rights does Nepal not have?

It matters because you cannot file for something that does not exist. Read against the statute, there is no geographical indication right, no collective mark and no certification mark under the trade mark law.

One qualifier. The Nepal Standards (Certification Mark) Act 2037 is a separate product-standards statute behind the NS quality mark, and it creates no filing category inside the trade mark system.

Nepal also has no standalone trade secrets statute, so confidential information is handled by contract rather than by a register. If a right you read about elsewhere is missing here, ask us on the contact page first.

How do you decide which right you need?

Work from the asset rather than from the name of a statute. The sequence below is the one we use on a first call.

Build the calendar around the slowest step. An unopposed trade mark commonly takes 12–14 months from filing to certificate, and 6–8 months in the smoothest cases, while no service standard is published for patents or designs.

1. Write down what a competitor would have to copy to hurt you: the name, the mechanism, the silhouette, the manual.
2. Match each item to one of the four rights; one product often produces three or four entries.
3. Check the register before committing to a name, using our trade mark conflict checker.
4. Pick the category for each mark with the NICE class finder, remembering one application covers one category.
5. Decide what stays confidential until filing, because a design and a patent turn on being new at the counter.
6. Gather the applicant paperwork, including a notarised power of attorney if somebody will act for you.
7. File the most important thing first and stage the rest, since first-to-file rewards the application actually lodged.
8. Diarise every renewal on the day the certificate arrives, not in the year it expires.

Can one product carry all four rights?

Comfortably. Take Himal Drop, a hypothetical Kathmandu firm selling a household water filter. This is an illustration, not a real case, and each element sits in a different column.

Its name and leaf logo are trade mark questions, and because it sells a product and runs a repair service, Sec. 18A(2) makes that two applications.

Its pressure valve is a patent question, its slim bottle silhouette may be an industrial design, and its booklet and app code are copyright works. Four routes, one product, three of them ending at the Department of Industry.

Does a foreign registration reach Nepal?

Sec. 21B is blunt about this: a patent, design or trade mark registered in a foreign country is not valid in Nepal unless it is also registered here, and no exception hides elsewhere in the Act.

Sec. 21C softens the route without softening the rule: the Department may register a foreign-registered right without enquiries where the foreign certificate is filed with it.

Nepal sits outside the Madrid System, the Patent Cooperation Treaty and the Hague system, so no international filing arrives here on its own. A foreign owner files nationally through a representative in Nepal, and WIPO publishes the party lists.

Which treaties does Nepal belong to?

Fewer than most assume, and the ones it holds matter more for standards than for filing. Nepal acceded to the Paris Convention in its Stockholm Act form with effect from 2001, and it is bound by the TRIPS Agreement through World Trade Organization membership.

The Act mentions a treaty exactly once. The 2006 amendment inserted a Paris Convention sentence into Sec. 21C, five years after that accession took effect.

Nepal is not a party to the classification treaty behind the NICE classification either, although the Department applies the Nice list under its own power in Sec. 18A(1). Using a classification and joining its treaty are different things.

Common mistakes

• Treating company registration as brand protection. The Office of the Company Registrar records a company, not a trade mark.
• Filing in one category and trading in three. Sec. 18A(2) needs a separate application for each one.
• Using the ® symbol before registration. Sec. 18B forbids presenting a mark as registered when it is not, and Sec. 19 adds a fine and confiscation of the goods.
• Looking for a patent in the Industrial Property Bulletin instead of the Nepal Gazette.
• Assuming copyright in a logo drawing stops a competitor using a similar brand name.
• Budgeting for a geographical indication or a certification mark filing that the trade mark law does not provide.

Where should you read the law yourself?

The consolidated statutes are published by the Nepal Law Commission, and the Act is short enough to read in one sitting — the fastest cure for second-hand summaries.

The office that applies it is the Department of Industry, whose counter is the only current source for forms and practice. Check which consolidation you hold, because the 2006 amendment deleted provisions that older copies still print.

This page is general information, not legal advice, and a live dispute deserves an advocate. Our frequently asked questions cover routine cases.

In short

Nepal has four types of intellectual property and one statute covers three. Trade marks, patents and industrial designs go to the Department of Industry; copyright goes elsewhere under its own Act.

Name the asset, match the right, check the register, file early because the country is first-to-file, and write the renewal date down. The rights that do not exist here matter as much as the ones that do.

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If you can describe what you have built, we can tell you which right fits it and which office it belongs to — start on the IP Sewa contact page, or see our trade mark registration service if the brand is urgent.