This is a follow-up to our October 2008 article about the cancellation of some anti-infringement clauses in Trade Mark Decree Law Number 556 by the Constitutional Court due to fact that these clauses, including penalties and security measures, should be prescribed only by laws, not decree laws.

The cancelled clauses are, in general, for the prevention of the illegal use of confusingly similar signs to a registered trade mark on the same or similar goods or services under protection.

The court decision was published in the Official Gazette on July 5 2008 with effect only from January 5 2009 to avoid having a legal void which would allow people to infringe the public benefit. It was considered that the government would pass the new trade mark draft law before the Turkish Senate in the presence of such a strong requirement. But unfortunately nothing has happened so far.

There are several tens of laws waiting in the queue of the Turkish Senate for debate and it is very difficult for these to be passed as they include including several hundreds of articles, each of which takes extensive discussion.

In order to accelerate the procedures and to overcome the present inconvenience, the government prepared a quick draft law with four articles – what could be called a patch law – including almost the same anti-infringement clauses with one specific addition to the list of illegal acts that can be prevented by a trade mark owner: the commercial use of an identical or similar sign to a registered trade mark on the internet such as a domain name, meta-tag or keyword.

We are all now looking forward to hearing good news from the Senate hopefully in a few weeks, so that the present legal void against infringers can be overcome.

by Ersin Dereligil, Destek Patent (Managing Intellectual Property)