Trademark registration Czech Republic

It is necessary to register a trademark in the Czech Republic if you want to obtain the exclusive trademark rights in this territory. There is a first-to-file jurisdiction. An application to register a trademark in the Czech Republic must be submitted to the UPV, the Czech Intellectual Property Office. Use of your trademark prior to registration is not a condition, although it does considerably reduce the chance of rejection on the basis of defective distinctiveness. Applications can be submitted by both natural and legal persons.

Anyone who is going to register a brand name in the Czech Republic must send a few other things to the UPV together with the completed application form. This concerns:

• text or image of the intended trademark
• personal details of the applicant
• list of specific goods and services to which protection will apply, including an indication of the classes according to the international Nice Classification

The administrative costs must be paid within one month after submitting the above. If not, your application will be considered as not sent.

If your trademark concerns a brand that consists of both verbal and figurative elements, we speak of a combined trademark. In that case, it is important to realize that the exclusive trademark rights arising from a registration only apply to the combination of trademark elements, exactly as you have submitted them to the Czech Intellectual Property Office. Do you also want to be able to protect the word element or the figurative element separately? Then it is best to submit a separate application for this.

If you do not do this, third parties can use these separate elements without this resulting in sanctions for them. After all, using an unregistered element is legal. This means that in practice there is nothing you can do about it. However, there is one exception to this: if a person or company offers the same products or services (or products or services that are very similar to what you offer), you file an objection based on confusing similarity.

To avoid problems with owners of already registered trademarks, it is important to gain insight into the existing trademarks before submitting your application. You can perform an informative trademark search in various available databases. This concerns not only the Czech database, but also those of the EUIPO and WIPO, respectively the databases of the European Union and the whole world.