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CategoryIndustrial Design
Published4 August 2026
Authors
Uğurcan TekinPartner
Alican TekinPartner

Registering an Industrial Design: What the Twelve-Month Grace Period Really Costs

The most common conversation in a design filing is about a trade fair that has already happened. The client exhibited in March, the competitor's copy appeared in June, and the question is whether the design can still be registered. The answer is usually yes, and the reason is Article 57(2) of the Industrial Property Code No. 6769. The more useful answer explains what the grace period does not do, because that is where design portfolios are lost.

Two Requirements, One Standard of Novelty

Article 55(1) defines a design as the appearance of the whole or a part of a product, or of the ornamentation on it, resulting from features such as line, shape, form, colour, material or surface texture. Article 55(2) defines product broadly — anything produced industrially or by hand, excluding computer programs, together with composite products and their parts, packaging, presentations of multiple objects perceived together, graphic symbols and typographic typefaces. Article 55(4) then makes the distinction that governs everything that follows: a design is protected as a registered design if registered under the Code, and as an unregistered design if first made available to the public in Türkiye.

Article 56 sets the two conditions. Novelty under Article 56(4) is absolute and worldwide: a design is new if no identical design has been made available to the public anywhere in the world before the filing or priority date, or, for an unregistered design, before the date of first disclosure. Individual character under Article 56(5) is assessed by the overall impression produced on the informed user, which must differ from the overall impression produced by any design compared with it.

Worldwide novelty means a catalogue photograph destroys a design as effectively as a granted registration does.

What Article 57(2) Actually Does

The grace period provides that where a design for which protection is sought has been made available to the public within the twelve months preceding the filing date, or the priority date where priority is claimed, by the designer or the designer's successor in title, by a third party with their consent, or as a result of an abuse of the relationship with them, that disclosure does not affect the novelty or individual character of the design.

Three points follow, and the third is the one that costs money. First, the period runs backwards from the filing date, so the twelve months are counted from the date the application is actually made, not from the end of any calendar period. Second, the abuse limb covers the manufacturer who was shown a prototype under a relationship of trust and then published it — a common and otherwise fatal scenario. Third, and decisively, the grace period is an exception to novelty. It is not an extension of the protection term, and it does not suspend the term that the disclosure itself started.

The Clock That Nobody Mentions

Article 69(2) provides that the term of protection for unregistered designs is three years from the date the design was first made available to the public, and it is not renewable. A design first disclosed in Türkiye is therefore protected from the day of disclosure — but only against copying, under Article 59(2), which expressly excludes from infringement the design of a designer who developed it through independent work and who could not reasonably be expected to have known of the earlier design.

“A design shown at a fair in March and filed in the following February is validly registered. It has also spent eleven of its thirty-six months of unregistered protection, and every one of those months was protected only against copying, not against independent creation.”

This is the trade-off the grace period conceals. Waiting eleven months to file costs nothing in terms of validity and everything in terms of the quality of protection in the interval. During that interval the proprietor must prove copying to succeed; from the filing date of a registration, under Article 59(1), it need not. Where a product's commercial life is short and imitation appears within the first season — which describes most of the furniture, lighting, packaging and consumer goods sectors — the difference between filing in month one and month eleven is the difference between an enforceable right and an evidential problem.

The Office Now Examines Novelty

This is the substantive break with the previous regime under Decree-Law No. 554, and it is still not fully absorbed in practice. Under Article 64(6), the Office refuses ex officio, among other grounds, an application for a design found not to be new. Formal examination under Article 64(1) to (5) continues as before, but a design that a search reveals to be anticipated is refused without an opposition being required.

The examination is limited to novelty. Individual character is not examined ex officio and must be raised by opposition or in invalidity proceedings. The practical consequence is that a favourable registration decision is weaker evidence of validity than applicants tend to assume: it confirms that the Office found no identical earlier design, not that the design produces a different overall impression on the informed user.

Three Months, Not Six

Under Article 67, third parties may oppose the grant of a design registration certificate within three months of publication. Under the previous Decree-Law the period was six months. Grounds include failure to meet the definition in Article 55, absence of novelty or individual character, contrariety to public policy or morality, features dictated solely by technical function, mandatory mechanical connections, conflict with Article 6ter of the Paris Convention, lack of standing under Article 3, bad faith, and a claim to entitlement.

Appeals against refusals under Article 64 are filed with 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. Article 156 makes that court exclusively competent for actions against decisions of the Office.

Two Filing Options Worth Knowing

Deferment of publication under Article 66 allows an applicant, at the time of filing and only then, to request that publication be deferred for thirty months from the filing or priority date. During deferment the visual representation and the file are closed to third-party inspection. This matters for a product not yet launched: the design is on file with its filing date secured, but competitors cannot read it out of the Bulletin ahead of launch.

Multiple applications allow several designs in a single filing. The Office's guidance sets the maximum at one hundred designs per application, and Article 61 requires that, ornamentations aside, the products in which the designs are used or to which they are applied belong to the same class of the Locarno classification. For a collection filed as a series this reduces the per-design cost substantially; for a mixed portfolio it does not apply at all.

Beyond Türkiye

Türkiye has been bound by the 1999 Geneva Act of the Hague Agreement since 1 January 2005. A single international application may cover up to one hundred designs of the same Locarno class, filed in English, French or Spanish, for an initial five years renewable in five-year terms. Where the law of a designated Contracting Party provides a longer term, the international registration benefits from it — which, for Türkiye, means the twenty-five years available under Article 69(1).

For applicants filing in the European Union, the framework changed materially in 2026. The reform introduced by Regulation (EU) 2024/2822 and Directive (EU) 2024/2823 became fully applicable on 1 July 2026: representations may now be filed as MP4 video and as 3D digital files, up to ten static views are permitted, communication with the Office is fully electronic, and the definition of design has been extended to cover animation, movement, graphical user interfaces and digital products. A Turkish applicant preparing a filing programme for both offices should now assume that what can be represented in an EU filing exceeds what a conventional line drawing set will capture.

Sources

Related practice areaIndustrial Property Law→

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