Trademark Non-Use Cancellation in Türkiye: The Five-Year Rule

What Article 9 Actually Requires

Industrial Property Law No. 6769 (Sınai Mülkiyet Kanunu) states the obligation compactly. Under Article 9, a registered trademark must be put to genuine use (ciddi kullanım) in Türkiye, in connection with the goods or services for which it is registered, within five years from the date of registration. The same provision covers the mirror situation: a mark that has been used but whose use is then suspended for an uninterrupted period of five years is equally exposed, unless there is a justifiable reason (haklı sebep) for the interruption.

Nothing happens automatically. The Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (Türk Patent ve Marka Kurumu, commonly TÜRKPATENT) does not audit registers for dormancy, and no renewal declaration of use is required. A registration will sit undisturbed for years. The use requirement becomes live only when a third party has a reason to raise it, and there are three usual moments.

The first is a standalone revocation request (iptal talebi) under Article 26. The second is a proof-of-use request under Article 19(2): where an opposition is based on an earlier mark that had been registered for more than five years at the relevant date, the applicant may ask the opponent to prove use, and an opponent who cannot do so loses the opposition on that ground. The mechanics of that stage are set out separately in our note on the grounds and deadlines that govern trademark opposition (itiraz) in Türkiye. The third is Article 25(7), which allows the same defence to be raised against a proprietor who brings an invalidity action.

The practical point is that non-use is rarely a problem in the abstract. It becomes a problem at precisely the moment the mark is needed.

When the Five-Year Clock Starts, and How It Is Counted

For a national Turkish registration, the five-year grace period runs from the date of registration, not from the application date and not from publication of the application. Where examination and any opposition proceedings have taken time, the gap between filing and registration can be substantial, and the grace period begins only at the far end of it.

The second limb of Article 9 works differently and is easier to overlook. It does not measure forward from registration; it looks backwards. The question is whether there has been an uninterrupted period of five years, ending at the relevant date, during which the mark was not used. That makes the exposure permanent rather than a one-off hurdle. A mark launched promptly in 2015, sold well until 2019, and then withdrawn from the Turkish market as a group restructured its distribution has a non-use problem, notwithstanding a strong early record.

Two further points are worth checking before assuming a mark is safe. First, use must be use in Türkiye. Sales into neighbouring markets, a global website with no Turkish offering, and reputation acquired abroad do not answer the question that Article 9 asks. Second, use must relate to the goods or services as registered; activity in an adjacent field is not automatically credited to the classes on the certificate.

Where resumed use is relied on, timing relative to the filing of the revocation request matters, and the weight given to a recently revived commercial presence is a matter of assessment rather than arithmetic.

Where the Request Is Filed Since the Forum Changed

Article 26 of Law No. 6769 was in the statute book from the start but did not take effect with the rest of the Law. Provisional Article 4 deferred it, providing that until it entered into force the revocation power would be exercised by the courts. That deferral expired seven years after the Law’s publication, and from 10 January 2024 the power to decide revocation requests passed to TÜRKPATENT.

The change is procedural rather than substantive: the test under Article 9 did not move. What moved is the forum, the pace and the shape of the file. A revocation request is now an administrative filing made by an interested person against the person recorded in the register as proprietor. The Office notifies the request to the proprietor, who has one month to submit evidence and responses, extendable by up to one further month on request. The Office’s decision is open to challenge before its Re-examination and Evaluation Board (Yeniden İnceleme ve Değerlendirme Kurulu), and the Board’s final decision is in turn subject to review before the specialised intellectual and industrial property courts.

That institutional shift, and what it means for how these files are run, is covered in our separate analysis of the move to an administrative cancellation regime in industrial property law. This note takes the forum as given and concentrates on the substance the proprietor has to meet.

One consequence of the substance deserves emphasis here. Under Article 27, revocation as a rule takes effect from the date the request was filed, although an earlier effective date may be decided where the ground arose earlier. Revocation is therefore forward-looking in a way that invalidity is not, and the filing date of the request becomes a date both sides will want to fix precisely.

Genuine Use Against Symbolic Use

Article 9 does not define genuine use exhaustively, and the working standard has been developed through case law. The Court of Cassation has held, in line with the settled European approach on which the Turkish provision is modelled, that use must be real commercial use on the market, undertaken to create or maintain a share of that market for the registered goods or services, rather than activity arranged for the purpose of preserving the registration.

That distinction does most of the work in practice. Arrangements that regularly fall short include a small number of invoices issued to an affiliated company shortly before a request is anticipated; a single sale of nominal value; a mark that appears on corporate letterhead or in a company name but never on goods or in the offering of services; and a website that displays the mark without any goods actually being offered to customers in Türkiye.

Volume is assessed in proportion to the sector rather than against a fixed threshold. Modest turnover can be genuine in a market for capital equipment or specialised professional services, where a handful of transactions a year is a normal commercial rhythm. The same figures in fast-moving consumer goods invite a different reading. The relevant comparison is between the use shown and the use that a proprietor genuinely exploiting the mark in that field would be expected to generate.

Continuity matters as well as scale. A steady low-volume record generally reads better than an isolated cluster of activity concentrated in the weeks before a request.

Evidence That Carries Weight: Invoices, Catalogues, Advertising

Because the proprietor bears the burden of proof, non-use cases are won and lost on the file. The evidence is expected to establish four things about the use relied on: its place, its time, its extent and its nature. Every document should be assessed against those four questions before it goes in.

Material that tends to carry weight includes:

• Invoices that are dated, addressed to customers in Türkiye, and identify both the mark and the goods or services by reference to the registered specification. Invoices bearing only an internal product code, with no link to the mark, prove little on their own.
• Catalogues, brochures and price lists carrying a date, ideally supported by evidence of circulation such as print orders, distribution lists or trade fair attendance.
• Advertising and media placement, with insertion orders, agency invoices and dated copies of the material as run.
• Packaging, labels and product photographs showing the mark as it is actually applied.
• Distribution and logistics records, including customs and import documentation, shipping records and distributor agreements evidencing supply into Türkiye.
• Sales figures broken down by year and by product, prepared so that they can be traced back to the underlying invoices.

Three recurring weaknesses are worth naming. Undated material is close to weightless, since it cannot be placed inside the relevant period. A witness statement or company declaration unsupported by primary documents is a summary of the case rather than proof of it. And documents in a foreign language will ordinarily need Turkish translation to be usable.

The cheapest response to all of this is administrative. A proprietor who keeps a dated use file per mark and per class, refreshed annually, will assemble a strong response in days rather than reconstructing a decade of trading from archived servers under a one-month deadline.

Variant Forms, Export-Only Use and Use by Others

Article 9 accommodates the ordinary realities of brand management, within limits.

Use of the mark in a form differing in elements that do not alter its distinctive character counts as use of the registered mark. A logo refresh, a change of typeface or colourway, or the addition of a descriptive or generic element will normally survive. The limit is reached where the form used has become, in substance, a different sign. Where a mark has been redesigned significantly, the safer course is to register the new form rather than argue that it is the old one.

Use of the mark on goods or their packaging solely for export purposes likewise counts, even though the goods are not sold into the Turkish market. That provision matters to manufacturers who produce in Türkiye for foreign markets and would otherwise hold a Turkish registration with no domestic sales to point to.

Use with the proprietor’s consent is treated as use by the proprietor. In practice this covers use by a licensee, a distributor, a franchisee or another company in the same group. Two cautions follow. The consent must be demonstrable, which is one reason to document licences properly and to consider recording them in the register. And the evidence must connect the third party’s activity to the proprietor’s mark, rather than presenting a distributor’s own commercial record in isolation.

Partial Revocation and the Shrinking Specification

Article 26 does not present a binary outcome. Where the ground for revocation is established only for some of the registered goods or services, revocation is granted in part: the specification is cut back to what the proprietor has proved, and the rest of the registration survives.

This is where broadly drafted filings show their cost. It is common, particularly for applicants working from a foreign home registration, to claim an entire class heading at filing. A company that in fact sells one category of clothing may hold a registration covering the whole of the relevant class, together with footwear, headgear and a range of accessories. Proving use of the actual product line will not preserve the remainder. After a partial revocation, the surviving registration is often a fair description of the business, but it may no longer cover the adjacent goods on which the proprietor had been relying to block third-party applications.

The defensive implication runs in both directions. A proprietor planning enforcement should assess, before filing anything, how much of its own specification could withstand a proof-of-use request. A party facing an opposition or an infringement claim from a mark registered for more than five years should assess the same question from the other side.

Specification drafting is therefore a use-planning exercise as much as a clearance exercise, a point developed further in our guide to trademark registration in Türkiye from a foreign owner’s perspective.

Justifiable Reasons, and What This Means for Foreign Owners

Article 9 excuses non-use where there is a justifiable reason. The concept is construed narrowly. The obstacle must be independent of the proprietor’s will, must arise in relation to the mark itself, and must make use impossible or unreasonable rather than merely inconvenient. Regulatory approval that has been properly pursued but not yet granted, or an import restriction affecting the goods in question, may qualify. Internal reorganisation, a decision to prioritise other markets, a shortage of budget, or a distributor search that was never concluded generally will not. Nor does a pending dispute over the mark automatically suspend the obligation.

For a foreign owner, the practical conclusion is short. Registration in Türkiye secures a priority position; it does not, by itself, secure a lasting right. A portfolio built defensively, with wide specifications and no domestic commercial activity behind them, becomes progressively more vulnerable the longer it sits, and that vulnerability tends to surface at the least convenient moment, when the mark is needed to stop a third party.

Three steps address most of the exposure. Diarise the five-year date for each registration from the date of registration and review the position well before it falls. Maintain a dated use file per mark and per class so that a one-month response deadline is an administrative task rather than an emergency. And where genuine use will realistically cover only part of a specification, consider whether the surplus classes are worth the annual cost of a registration that may not survive a challenge.

Our intellectual property practice advises on portfolio reviews and use evidence for marks registered in Türkiye, and our trademark litigation and commercial dispute resolution team handles contested revocation, opposition and invalidity proceedings before the Office and the specialised courts.

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Related Practice Areas

• Intellectual Property
• Trademark Registration & Litigation
• Patent Litigation
• Copyright & Anti-Piracy