What determines a company's market value today is rarely its factories or its real estate. It is its registered trademarks, algorithms, designs and patents: its intangible assets. Yet many companies in Türkiye still operate on the assumption that registration is the end of the exercise, and lose substantial investments to infringement or to cancellation proceedings brought by competitors.
Drawing on Industrial Property Law No. 6769 and current TÜRKPATENT practice, we look below at how companies should defend their intellectual property portfolios rather than merely register them, and what to do when a dispute arises.
1. Weak and Overly Broad Applications
Protection of industrial property rights in Türkiye is based entirely on registration. A name notarised or used in trade for years carries little weight if it is not recorded in your name at TÜRKPATENT.
Nice classification errors: Companies often file across classes in which they do not operate, on the theory that wider is safer: a software company filing in textiles, for instance. Inflating the number of classes is not a ground for absolute refusal; the absolute grounds under Article 5 relate to the sign itself, such as lack of distinctiveness or descriptiveness. But the additional classes increase filing costs, expose the application to opposition from prior rights holders in those classes, and leave the mark open to a cancellation request in respect of unused classes after five years.In practice: The filing should be narrow and focused, while covering the company's commercial plans over roughly five years, and should be aligned with domain names and social media handles.2. Defending the Portfolio: Bulletin Watching and the Opposition Window
Holding a strong trademark does not prevent competitors from filing marks that differ by a letter or two, or logos that resemble yours.
The registry will not warn you: TÜRKPATENT does not notify you when a similar application is filed. Monitoring whether a confusingly similar mark has been published is your responsibility, or your counsel's.The two-month rule (Article 18): Once a mark is published in the Official Trademark Bulletin, you have two months to file an opposition. If you miss that window, the competitor obtains the registration, and removing it afterwards requires an invalidity action before the courts, a costly process that can take years. This is why systematic trademark watch services are central to portfolio management.3. The Obligation to Use: The Five-Year Rule
This rule is less widely understood than it should be. If you register a trademark and never bring a product or service to market under it, the registration becomes vulnerable.
Under Article 9, a trademark may be cancelled if it has not been used without proper reason within five years of registration, or if use has been suspended for an uninterrupted five-year period.The procedure changed in 2024, and this is the point most often missed. Non-use cancellation requests are no longer heard by the courts. Since 10 January 2024, when Article 26 came into force, cancellation authority has passed to TÜRKPATENT: interested parties file the request directly with the Office and the matter proceeds administratively. The aim is to allow unused marks to be removed from the register without lengthy litigation. If the proprietor cannot prove use through invoices, marketing materials and sales records within the period allowed after notification, the mark is cancelled.The change cuts both ways: unused marks in your own portfolio can be lost far more quickly, but a competitor's dormant mark can be cleared just as fast. (Invalidity actions, which argue that the mark should never have been registered in the first place, remain within the jurisdiction of the courts.)4. Patent Strategy: Secrecy or Registration?
A company with an invention has two options.
If the invention cannot be understood through reverse engineering (the classic example being a beverage formula), keeping it as a trade secret may be preferable to patenting it, because obtaining a patent requires disclosing the technical detail to the public.If the invention is a mechanism or an architecture that can be reverse engineered, it should be taken to registration through the tests of novelty, inventive step and industrial applicability, as a patent or, where speed matters, as a utility model.5. Responding to Infringement: Evidence Preservation and Interim Relief
When you discover that a competitor is copying your trademark, patent or design (counterfeit goods on an e-commerce platform, for example), instructing counsel to "file a damages claim" is the wrong first move.
1. Preserve the evidence first: A party that learns litigation is coming will take down listings and move stock. Article 400 of the Code of Civil Procedure allows evidence to be preserved; a legal interest is presumed where the evidence would otherwise be lost, or where relying on it would become significantly more difficult, a condition typically satisfied in cases where e-commerce listings can be deleted and stock moved. The preservation is carried out by a judge with a court-appointed expert, at the premises or on the servers. Proceeding without prior notice to the other side is an exceptional measure: the application must be framed for it, and the concrete risk of the evidence being lost must be demonstrated.
2. Interim relief: Sales should be stopped and, where appropriate, an order sought for goods to be withdrawn from the market.
3. Quantifying loss: Only then does the damages claim follow, covering the profit the infringing party derived from the counterfeit goods.
This article provides general information under industrial property legislation and does not constitute binding legal advice on the management of your trademark or patent risks.
Last updated: 10 August 2026.
