Emerging Issues In Turkish Intellectual Property Law

Law is national, in other words it is local and each law system is peculiar to itself. The dizzy developments in the information age result in incredible alterations regarding IP law. Although the rules of law bear a national character, the alterations in this area hold global character at some degree via international agreements. Nevertheless, despite all the harmonization endeavors via international agreements, IP law is still preserving its national character. Although a crucial ground is covered by force of Common Market, the national character even in EU is not completely ruled out. Briefly, the nationality in IP law is still too dominant.
In these days even the medium sized firms have commercial activities, such as manufacturing, sales and marketing outside of their own countries. Therefore, the commercial players that carry on business in the international arena cannot stand against the protection of IPRs in the international scale.
According to the IMF records, when purchasing power parity is predicated on, with the 932 billion $, the Turkish economy is the 16th biggest economy of the world and on the other hand, Turkey, with the % 8.9 growth rate, is the second most growing country, after China, in the world. Thus, it seems not possible for companies having business in international area to neglect Turkish market.
Compared to previous years, with the consolidation of the economy and the awareness in the community, Turkey has begun to reserve crucial amounts of share to the R&D studies. According to the data for 2008, Turkey has spent approximately 5.4 billion $ to R&D and the rate of this amount to the national income is 7.3 per thousand. The aim of the government for 2013 is to pull this rate to 2%. It has been transferred a considerable amount of share to R&D from the public budget in recent years and the transfer will be continued. In other words, the R&D studies are in the tendency of a fast increase and the increase will be even faster in the near future.
As a matter of fact, with respect to trademark, patent and design applications filed within the Turkish Patent Institute, the interest of both the local and foreign firms has increased particularly in Turkey. Today in Turkey, it is made over seventy thousand trademark applications per year and it is on the third rank in Europe regarding trademark applications. Twelve thousand of the all trademark applications have been filed by foreign applicants. It should be taken into the account that total number of the annual trademark applications was around only sixteen thousand in 1995. The number of patent applications, which were approximately one thousand five hundred in the mentioned year, has escalated to seven thousand in 2009. On the other hand, total amount of the annual design applications has reached to thirty thousand in the recent years. These numbers confirm our finding on the fact that Turkey has become a very important market for companies having business in the international area.
In the study that you are holding now, after the general issues on nearly all areas of IP law, we focused on the emerging issues and problematic subjects. Some of the problems, examined in this study, arise as such by its nature, just like the problems in well-known trademarks while the others occurred because of the applications peculiar to Turkey, such as the protection of unregistered innovations or designs under unfair competition regulations for an unlimited period of time.
Our study has been prepared more of by taking the IP problems that the foreign companies have experienced in Turkey into consideration. The readers will on one side be introduced to the problematic areas of Turkish execution; on the other side will be able to observe the variations from the general executions in the world.