The Legislative Assembly received a bill submitted by the Executive Branch to ratify the Riyadh Treaty on Design Law, together with its regulations and the resolutions of its diplomatic conference. The treaty was adopted in Riyadh on November 22, 2024, and signed by El Salvador on October 31, 2025, at the headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

This instrument seeks to simplify and harmonize the procedures for protecting industrial designs, allowing companies, creators, and rights holders to manage the protection of their products' visual appearance more efficiently across different jurisdictions.

In El Salvador, the new Intellectual Property Law already marked an important step forward by incorporating the industrial design patent and recognizing protection for drawings, models, three-dimensional shapes, and graphical user interfaces. Our legislation was therefore already moving toward a more up-to-date system, and ratifying the Treaty would complement that evolution.

In practical terms, an industrial design protects the external appearance of a product — that is, what makes it visually distinctive through its shape, lines, colors, contours, ornamentation, or presentation. It can cover packaging, bottles, furniture, accessories, devices, and graphical user interfaces. Its commercial importance lies in the fact that appearance can become an asset for standing out in the market. However, registering a design in one country does not automatically grant protection in another.

For this reason, a company that wishes to manufacture, sell, distribute, or license a product in several markets must consider an international strategy. Otherwise, it could face difficulties preventing copies or unauthorized uses where it has not applied for protection.

On this point, the Riyadh Treaty builds on the Paris Convention, since it does not create international priority from scratch but instead uses a system already recognized by that convention. This prevents subsequent disclosures or applications from affecting the design's novelty and allows the international strategy not to depend on filing all applications on the same day.

In addition, it provides for the possibility of temporarily keeping the design unpublished. This reservation makes it possible to prepare the launch of a product, packaging, shape, bottle, piece of furniture, or accessory without consumers or competitors knowing about it in advance, reducing the risk of copies and better coordinating the commercial strategy with legal protection.

Although Salvadoran law already regulates many important aspects, the Riyadh Treaty would incorporate a more uniform international framework of rules and mechanisms to manage these rights, moving us toward a more modern, practical system aligned with international standards.