NEWSLETTER-2020-metin

Trademark License Agreements* Att. Zeynep Ezgi Yanarateş Article 148 of the Industrial Property Code numbered 6769 (“IPC”) regulates that industrial property rights can be subject to vari- ous legal transactions, such as transfer, seizure, and collateral. One of the permitted legal transactions is that industrial property rights, in- cluding trademark rights, can be subject to license agreement. Article 24 of the IPC clearly states that “ The trademark right may be subject to a license for a part or all of the goods or services for which it is registered ”. Within this scope, the ‘right of use’ of the trademarks, except for guarantee marks, may be transferred to a third party. The feature that distinguishes the license from the inheritance and transfer of the trademarks is that the essence of the right is transferred to a third party in the event of inheritance and transfer, while the li- censee has only the right to use the trademark with the license 1 . Registered or unregistered trademarks may be the subject of the trademark license agreement. However, since the license agreement of an unregistered trademark cannot be registered, it cannot benefit from the protection provided by the registration of the license agreement. In addition, in accordance with the last paragraph of Article 148 of the IPC, it has been clearly decided that trademark applications can also be subject to a trademark license agreement. Parties of the Trademark License Agreement The parties to the license agreement are referred to as licensor and licensee. In practice, although the licensor is usually the owner of the trademark, there are also cases in which the licensee holds the title of licensor, if sub-licenses are allowed in the agreement. The obligation * Article of October, 2020 1 Ceylan, Çiğdem : ‘ Marka Lisans Sözleşmesi ’, Ankara Barosu 26 Nisan Fikri Mülkiyet Günü Özel Sayısı, January 2017, V.19, No. 1, p. 65