Frequently asked questions

Almost any sign that lets customers tell your goods or services apart from someone else's: words, names, logos, slogans, letter and number combinations, and in some cases shapes, colours or sounds. What cannot be registered are signs that merely describe the product, generic terms, misleading indications, and signs that offend public order.

It has to be distinctive, capable of identifying where the goods or services come from, and it must not be purely descriptive or deceptive. It also must not collide with earlier rights, such as prior trademarks registered for identical or similar goods and services in the same jurisdiction. The IPI does not check conflicts with earlier marks for you, which is why we recommend a proper availability search before any filing.

You file an application with the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (IPI), naming the mark and the goods and services it should cover. The IPI examines the application on absolute grounds and then registers the mark. Publication of the registration opens a three-month window during which owners of earlier marks may file an opposition.

Ten years from the filing date, and it can be renewed for further ten-year periods without limit.

Yes. If a Swiss trademark goes unused for five consecutive years, any third party can request its cancellation for non-use. Keeping evidence of use is part of good portfolio housekeeping.

No, they are three different things. Entering a name in the commercial register or buying a domain gives you no trademark rights, and vice versa. The safest position is to align all three: company name, domain and registered trademark.

Usually through the Madrid System administered by WIPO, which extends a Swiss base mark to the countries you select in one procedure. Direct national filings or an EU trademark at the EUIPO can be the better route depending on your markets: we design the strategy case by case.

Patents protect technical inventions that are new, involve an inventive step and are industrially applicable. Mere ideas, discoveries and business methods as such are excluded. One rule matters above all: keep the invention confidential until the application is filed: your own publication can destroy novelty and with it the patent.

Up to twenty years from filing, subject to annual fees. Protection in Switzerland can be obtained through a national filing or through a European patent validated in Switzerland. One difference matters more than the fee: the IPI grants a Swiss national patent without examining novelty or inventive step, so the right exists quickly and cheaply but is only tested if you enforce it, while the European Patent Office examines in full before grant. Which you want depends on whether the patent is there to deter, to license or to litigate.

The appearance of a product: its shape, lines, surfaces and colours. In Switzerland a design must be new and original, and protection runs in five-year periods up to a maximum of twenty-five years.

No. In Switzerland copyright arises automatically the moment a work is created: there is no copyright register. Protection generally lasts for seventy years after the author's death.

Because there is no register, the burden of proof is on you. A cryptographic timestamp is one practical way to strengthen your position: it seals a fingerprint of your file into the Bitcoin blockchain, which can later help to show that the file existed in that form at that time. Our online timestamping service issues verifiable certificates in minutes (CHF 9 a year for unlimited documents), each document with its own certificate.

A timestamp can be verified independently by anyone, without relying on us. It is not a legally prescribed form of proof, however: what weight it carries is for a court to assess freely in each individual case. It documents the existence and integrity of a file at a given date; it does not by itself prove who the author is. We advise on the evidence strategy that fits your situation.

Yes. We represent clients in opposition and cancellation proceedings, act against counterfeits and domain grabbing, and manage take-downs of pirated content. Prevention is cheaper than litigation, which is why monitoring is part of our portfolio management.

We are based in Lausanne and act throughout Switzerland, in the EU, in Ukraine and in Central Asia through our partner network, in English, French, German, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish.