Ankara District Court: Cancellation of Several Board Decisions May be Requested in Single Action
In a recent action before the Ankara Second IP Court (Merits No 2015/414 E, 2016/283 K), the applicant had requested the cancellation of four decisions rendered by the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office’s Re- Examination and Evaluation Board rejecting the registration of four trademark applications for the figurative marks PRIVAT KAFFEE, depicted below: The applications had been opposed by a third party based on their confusing similarity with the word mark PRIVAT and the… »
Article 138/3 of EPC Applies During Pending Proceedings
As Turkey is a member of EPC, any provision of the EPC has the power of national law and can be directly applicable for European patents validated in Turkey. However as is well known, the EPC does not have many provisions binding the national courts. One of them is Article 138/3 which gives the European patent owner the right to limit the patent in the event of an invalidation action and orders the national court to take the limited version of the patent as the basis of… »
Life Sciences Newsletter, March 2017
New decree on medicines pricing published Dicle Doğan and Bentley James Yaffe, Gun + Partners The new Decree on the Pricing of Pharmaceutical Products for Human Use was published in the Official Gazette on 24 February 2017 and came into effect on the same day. The new decree abolishes the former pricing decree dated 15 June 2015. In Turkey the reference price system is applied to determine pharmaceutical prices. The ex-factory price in Turkey is determined by taking into… »
Injection of Capital Advance as a Recovery Method For Technical Bankruptcy Under The Turkish Commercial Code
According to the company statistics published by the Turkish Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges (TOBB), a total of 63,709 companies were incorporated in Turkey provided that 4,523 of these companies were incorporated with foreign capital only in 2016. However, due to certain reasons such as incorporation of the companies with the minimum capital required by the law, many companies may fall in the technical bankruptcy situation soon after their establishment. Although… »
Draft Law on Labour Courts and Proposed Mandatory Mediation Phase
Introduction The Ministry of Justice recently prepared a new draft Law on Labour Courts and shared it with the relevant public institutions and organisations for review. The principle of employment cases is to conduct litigation in a timely manner. However, in practice, the labour courts’ heavy workload obstructs this principle and employment cases take a considerable amount of time. The draft law aims to ease the judiciary’s workload in this regard and accelerate the… »
Turkey Protects 3D Marks, Colours and Sounds
Turkey began this year with a new law regulating and effecting almost all intellectual property rights, unifying them into a single code. This Industrial Property Code number 6967 (“the IP Code”) came into force on 10 January 2017. The IP Code replaces the Decree Laws which regulated the protection of trademarks, patents, geographical indications and industrial designs. Turkey has a long tradition of protecting intellectual property rights and is signatory to almost all the… »