Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (TURKPATENT) has published a new examination guideline for trademarks, titled “Trademark Examination Guideline.”
The Guideline, which is a revised version of the Guideline issued in 2011, was prepared based on the decisions of the Board of Appeal of TURKPATENT, the decisions of the Turkish Intellectual Property Courts, the case-law of the Turkish Supreme Court. It also takes into consideration the decisions and practices of the European Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Thus, the Guideline clarifies many challenging issues with trademark examples in view of the decisions within the scope of the Turkish and European law and practices.
The Guideline covers many aspects of trademarks and guides examiners, applicants and attorneys for evaluating the registrability of the trademarks under the Turkish Industrial Property Law. Specifically, the Guideline provides general approaches regarding identicalness, confusingly similarity, descriptiveness, and distinctiveness issues, non-traditional trademarks, hashtag trademarks and many hot topics.
The Guideline is not a legislative or regulatory document and thus does not have a binding nature, rather remains a document of practice covering various examples and scenarios in the face of the challenging trademark cases.
TURKPATENT states that the Guideline is not a static but dynamic document changing with the new laws, regulations and the case-law in both Turkey and European Union. Therefore, it is stated that the document will be regularly updated to comply with the most recent developments on trademark matters.
The Guideline will be extremely valuable for the examiners and trademark practitioners in Turkey, as the Turkish Industrial Property Law, which came into force in early 2017, has required the trademark examiners and practitioners to develop new approaches on trademark matters.
Download Link:
Turkish Trademark Examination Guideline (2019)
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