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CategoryTrademark
Published18 August 2026
Authors
Uğurcan TekinPartner
Alican TekinPartner

Administrative Revocation of Trademarks: A First Assessment of the TÜRKPATENT Route

For seven years, Article 26 of the Industrial Property Code No. 6769 existed on paper without existing in practice. The provision transferring the power to revoke a registered trademark from the courts to TÜRKPATENT was deferred by Article 192, and Provisional Article 4 instructed the courts to keep applying Article 26's own substantive rules in the meantime. That arrangement ended on 10 January 2024. What did not arrive with it was the procedure.

The gap lasted fourteen months. The Office held jurisdiction from January 2024 but had no implementing regulation, and applicants who filed revocation requests in that window waited without a framework for how their files would be handled. The amending Regulation published in the Official Gazette of 15 March 2025 (No. 32842) closed the gap by inserting Articles 30/A and 30/B into the Implementing Regulation and renaming the relevant chapter "Oppositions, Proof of Use, Revocation and Settlement". Eighteen months of practice later, the shape of the new route is visible enough to assess.

Revocation moved from the courtroom to the register — but the burden of proof moved with it.

What Can Be Revoked, and on What Ground

Article 26(1) lists four grounds. The first, and in practice the only one that generates volume, is non-use under Article 9(1): a mark not put to genuine use in Türkiye for the goods or services for which it is registered within five years of registration, or whose use has been suspended for an uninterrupted five years, without proper reason. The remaining three grounds — the mark having become the common name for the product through the proprietor's acts or omissions, the mark having become misleading as to nature, quality or geographical origin through use by or with the consent of the proprietor, and use contrary to the technical regulation of a guarantee or collective mark under Article 32 — are available but rarely invoked.

Two features of the non-use ground deserve attention before any request is drafted. Article 9(2) treats use in a form differing in elements which do not alter the distinctive character of the mark as use, and treats use on goods or packaging solely for export purposes as use. Article 9(3) treats use with the proprietor's consent — licensed use — as use by the proprietor. A revocation request built on the assumption that only the registered proprietor's own use of the exact registered sign counts will fail on the facts.

The Burden Runs the Other Way

In an ordinary administrative application the applicant proves its case. Article 30/A reverses this for the non-use ground: it is the trademark proprietor who must prove genuine use, or proper reasons for non-use. The applicant's evidential task is limited to establishing standing and identifying the goods and services attacked. This is the single most consequential feature of the new route, and it is what makes revocation a genuinely different instrument from an invalidity action.

The proprietor's response window is one month from notification, extendable by up to one further month on request made within that first month — Article 26(7) and Article 30/A in identical terms. There is no discretion beyond that. A proprietor who treats the first notification as routine correspondence and lets the month run has, in practical terms, lost the mark for the goods identified in the request.

“The three months before the request is filed are invisible to the file. A proprietor who begins using the mark because it has heard a request is coming has produced evidence the Office is required to disregard.”

Article 26(4) is the provision that gives the rule its teeth. Use undertaken in anticipation of a revocation request, within the three months preceding submission of the request to the Office, is not taken into account. The drafting is deliberately about anticipation rather than mere timing, but the practical effect is a three-month exclusion zone at the end of the relevant period. Advising a proprietor to "start using it again quickly" once a request has been signalled is advice that generates inadmissible evidence.

The Escrow Mechanism and What It Costs

Article 30/B introduced a fee structure with no precedent in Turkish industrial property practice. A revocation request carries two payments made at the same moment: the Office fee and an escrow amount. Under the 2026 tariff published in the Official Gazette of 31 December 2025, item 02.01.30 (trademark revocation fee) and item 02.01.31 (revocation request escrow amount) each stand at 35,320.00 Turkish lira. The applicant therefore pays 70,640.00 lira to open the file.

The escrow is then allocated by outcome. If the request is rejected in its entirety, the escrow goes to the trademark proprietor. If it is granted in its entirety, it returns to the applicant. If the outcome is partial — some goods revoked, others not — the escrow is recorded as Office revenue. Amounts not claimed within ten years of the decision becoming final are recorded as Office revenue. The mechanism does not apply retroactively to requests filed before 15 March 2025.

The design intent is clear enough: to price out speculative requests and to compensate proprietors dragged into a file without merit. The design consequence is equally clear, and it is the partial-outcome rule that produces it. A carefully targeted request — one that attacks precisely the goods for which the applicant can see no use, leaving alone those where use is evident — is the request most likely to succeed partially, and partial success is the only outcome in which the applicant recovers nothing. The fee structure rewards the all-or-nothing filing over the well-drafted one. That is worth saying plainly, because it runs against how a practitioner would otherwise advise.

The Sentence Nobody Expected

Article 30/A(10) states that a revocation decision may not be given in respect of similar goods or services. The sentence did not appear in the draft circulated before adoption, and its meaning has been contested since publication. On the narrow reading, it does no more than confirm that the Office decides within the scope of the request and cannot extend revocation to goods the applicant did not attack. On the broad reading, it means that where use is proven for one item, the Office may not revoke registration for goods similar to that item — which would require the Office to conduct a similarity assessment inside what is meant to be a use assessment, and would import the logic of opposition proceedings into a procedure designed to avoid it.

The practical advice pending clarification is to draft the goods list in the request with the precision one would use in an opposition: identify the attacked goods individually rather than by class heading, and do not assume that proof of use for one item within a class will be confined to that item.

When the Decision Takes Effect

Article 27 draws a distinction that matters commercially. An invalidity decision is effective from the application date — the registration is treated as never having existed. A revocation decision is effective from the date the revocation request was submitted to the Office. On request, and where the conditions for revocation arose at an earlier date, the decision may be made effective from that earlier date.

That last clause is easy to overlook and expensive to overlook. Where the applicant is defending an infringement claim, or needs the register cleared as of a particular date for a filing of its own, the earlier effective date must be asked for and the date on which the conditions arose must be pleaded. It is not granted as a matter of course.

Revocation or Litigation

The route is administrative, decided on the file, without a hearing and without expert examination. A decision of the Trademarks Department may be appealed to the Re-examination and Evaluation Board within two months of notification, and the Board's decision may be challenged before the Ankara Civil Court for Intellectual and Industrial Property Rights within two months. Filing that action does not of itself suspend the entry of the revocation on the register.

Set against an invalidity action, the comparison is not straightforward. Revocation is faster and does not require a court file, and the reversed burden of proof is a real advantage where the applicant has no visibility into the proprietor's commercial activity. Against that, the entry cost of 70,640 lira is payable up front and, on the most likely outcome for a well-drafted request, is not recovered; the procedure has no oral phase in which a weak use file can be tested; and the effective date runs from the request rather than from registration. Where the objective is to clear a blocking mark before a filing, revocation is usually the right instrument. Where the objective is to defeat a mark that should never have been registered, invalidity remains the only route that reaches back to the application date.

Sources

  • Industrial Property Code No. 6769, Articles 9, 26, 27, 32 and 192, and Provisional Article 4
  • Regulation amending the Implementing Regulation of the Industrial Property Code, Official Gazette of 15 March 2025, No. 32842 (inserting Articles 30/A and 30/B)
  • TÜRKPATENT — trademark transaction fees (items 02.01.30 and 02.01.31, 2026 tariff)
  • Communiqué on the fee tariff to be applied by TÜRKPATENT in 2026, Official Gazette of 31 December 2025 (5th repeated issue)
Related practice areaIndustrial Property Law→

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