Intellectual property is often a company’s most valuable and most exposed asset. Türkiye’s modern Industrial Property Law No. 6769, published and in force since 10 January 2017, brought trademark, patent, design and geographical-indication rules into a single, EU-aligned framework. Geographical indications are now governed directly by this law. Disputes under the law are heard by specialised civil and criminal IP courts, set up where the Ministry of Justice considers necessary; where none exists, designated general civil and criminal courts of first instance hear them. Actions against TÜRKPATENT decisions go to the Ankara IP Civil Court (Article 156).
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For a foreign business, the practical message is simple: Turkish IP rights are territorial. A trademark registered in London, New York or Frankfurt gives you nothing in Türkiye. To be protected here, you must secure rights here, and the earlier you do it, the cheaper and safer the whole exercise becomes.
The core pillars of protection
Turkish law protects principal categories of industrial and creative rights, each with its own registry, term and strategy:
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- Trademarks: words, logos, shapes, colours and even sounds that distinguish your goods or services (see our guide on trademark registration for foreign owners). Registered before TÜRKPATENT for ten years, renewable indefinitely.
- Patents and utility models: technical inventions. Patents run up to twenty years and require novelty, inventive step and industrial application; utility models offer a faster, lighter route for smaller innovations for up to ten years.
- Designs: the appearance of the whole or part of a product, or of its ornamentation, resulting from features such as lines, shape, form, colour, material or surface texture. A registered design is protected for up to twenty-five years.
- Copyright and anti-piracy: literary, artistic, musical and software works, governed by the Law on Intellectual and Artistic Works No. 5846. Protection does not depend on registration, and the term is generally the author’s life plus seventy years.
- Other IP fields: covering domain name disputes under TRABIS & UDRP, plant breeders’ rights under Law No. 5042, and commercial protection against free-riding under unfair competition law.
- Trade secrets: the one category with no registry and no fixed term. Confidential business information is protected only for as long as it is genuinely kept confidential, through the unfair competition rules of the Commercial Code (Article 55) and contract rather than a certificate; see trade secrets and confidentiality disputes.
| Right | Registration | Maximum term |
|---|---|---|
| Trademark | TÜRKPATENT | 10 years, renewable indefinitely |
| Patent | TÜRKPATENT | 20 years |
| Utility model | TÜRKPATENT | 10 years |
| Design | TÜRKPATENT | 25 years (5-year renewal terms) |
| Copyright | Not required for protection | Generally life of the author + 70 years |
Designs stand alongside those pillars as a right of their own, addressed under industrial design protection.
Why acting early is everything
Because Türkiye is first-to-file, the earlier application generally prevails, even against the originator of a brand, unless one of the limited grounds (bad faith, well-known status, prior rights acquired through use, an agent filing without consent) applies. Foreign companies entering the Turkish market routinely discover that a distributor, former partner or opportunistic third party has already registered “their” mark and is now demanding a buy-out, blocking imports, or trading on their reputation.
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If you plan to sell, license or manufacture in Türkiye, file your trademark before you announce your arrival, not after. The single most expensive words in Turkish IP are “we’ll register it once we launch.”
Recovering a hijacked mark is possible through bad-faith invalidation and well-known-mark claims, but it means litigation: years of proceedings, expert reports and legal fees that dwarf the cost of a timely filing. Prevention here is not a cliché; it is a budget line that saves you a fortune.
Timing matters within the process too. Once your application is published in the Official Trademark Bulletin, third parties have two months to oppose, and once a competitor’s mark is published, you have the same two months to oppose theirs. Watching the Bulletin is therefore not optional housekeeping: an opposition filed on time costs a fraction of a cancellation action filed after registration.
What we do
We act as a single point of contact for the entire life cycle of an IP right, so you are not stitching together clearance searches, filings, renewals and disputes across different advisers.
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Clearance and filing
Before you commit to a name or design, we run availability and freedom-to-operate searches on the TÜRKPATENT registers to flag conflicts early. We then prepare and prosecute trademark, patent, utility-model and design applications, respond to office actions and refusals, and manage the two-month opposition window that follows publication in the Official Trademark Bulletin.
Portfolio management
For clients with more than a handful of rights, we maintain the portfolio as a living asset: docketing renewal deadlines, recording assignments, mergers and name changes, structuring licences, and coordinating filings in Türkiye alongside your international (Madrid Protocol) strategy so nothing lapses through a missed date.
Enforcement and anti-counterfeiting
When rights are threatened, the tools include cease-and-desist letters, infringement and cancellation actions, preliminary injunctions, customs recordals and criminal complaints for counterfeiting. Interim measures can include the seizure of infringing goods wherever they are, including in customs areas (Article 159). Under Law No. 5846, infringing online content is removed on the right holder’s application, and if the infringement continues the service to the content provider can be suspended through the public prosecutor (Additional Article 4). Trademark counterfeiting is a crime under Article 30 of Law No. 6769, punishable for the main offence by one to three years’ imprisonment and a judicial fine of up to 20,000 days; it is prosecuted on complaint and only for marks registered in Türkiye.
One practical note on customs: a recordal only works if officers can recognise the fake. Recordals work better with product identification guides (photos, security features, authorised importer lists) that help a customs officer distinguish genuine goods from counterfeits. We prepare and update these guides as part of the recordal, so the application is usable in practice rather than remaining a right on paper.
A registered right you never enforce trains infringers to ignore you. Consistent, visible enforcement is what actually protects a brand’s value over time.
Transactions and due diligence
IP frequently sits at the centre of deals. We conduct IP due diligence for acquisitions and investments, confirm chain of title, and draft licensing, franchising and technology-transfer agreements that are enforceable under Turkish law and clear about ownership of anything created during the relationship. Where an invention is made by staff rather than bought in, ownership follows a statutory route that cannot be varied to the employee’s detriment (Article 117 of Law No. 6769), which we handle under employee inventions and R&D intellectual property.
What this means for you
If you are entering the Turkish market, treat IP as a launch task, not an afterthought. In practical terms:
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- Search first. A quick clearance search can spare you a rebrand and an opposition.
- File before you launch. Registration is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy against a hijacked mark.
- Record with customs. A customs recordal turns the border into your first line of defence against counterfeits.
- Diarise your renewals. Rights lapse silently; a single missed deadline can undo years of goodwill.
- Enforce consistently. Deal with infringements early, while they are small and cheap to stop.
Whether you are protecting a single trademark or building a cross-border portfolio, we bring the same rigour and the same clarity, in English and Turkish, so that decisions taken in your headquarters translate cleanly into protected rights on the ground in Türkiye.
Related Practice Areas & Strategic Legal Guides
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- Real Estate & Property Law: Title deed due diligence, foreign property acquisitions, and Land Registry (TKGM) transfers.
- Intellectual Property & Trademark Litigation: Trademark, patent, and copyright enforcement before TÜRKPATENT and IP Courts.
- Personal Data Protection (KVKK/GDPR): VERBİS registration, data inventory mapping, and cross-border data transfer compliance.
- Legal Matters in Istanbul for Foreign Clients and Companies: Full-service commercial and civil advocacy before Istanbul courthouses.
