The European Union Intellectual Property Office has granted Turkey permission to register the term Turkaegean as a trademark.
Turkey submitted an application in December to the Turkish Tourism Promotion and Development Agency. Following the EU decision the trademark will remain valid until July 2031.
According to the GoTürkiye website’s tourism campaign, Turkaegean is the “coast of happiness”.
“Join the Turkaegean experience in the coast of happiness! The Aegean Region of Türkiye offers you the beautiful landscapes, dazzling coastlines, immaculate beaches, pine woods and olive groves,” it says.
Meanwhile, the United States Patent and Trademark Office refused the application from the same Turkish agency to register the trademark in the US.
The reasons given for the provisional refusal are; that the wording in the application that identifies the services offered under Turkaegean is indefinite, a description of the trademark was not included in the original application and the applicant’s email address was not included.
It gave the Turkish Tourism Promotion and Development Agency six months to resubmit the application through a US-licensed attorney, Kathimerini reported.
A search on the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization shows that the trademark Turkaegean is described as “active” in five jurisdictions, Australia, Brunei, Japan, WIPO and the EU and is “pending” in another 15, Mongolia, Cambodia, Canada, Cuba, Iceland, Indonesia, Israel, Laos, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Samoa, Singapore, Thailand and the US.