Les délits en matière des marques

In order to reply the increasing and fastly changing needs of the commercial life and in order to comply with the engagements that Turkey undertook within the European Union, the protection of the industrial property rights, in particular the trademark rights due to the economic value they represent a great importance.When the dimensions and the qualities of the violations are taken into consideration, it can be seen that the protection with the private law materials is insufficient and must be supported with the criminal law norms.Although Turkey undertook to harmonize its legislation with the European Union, it is a fact that the changes made in the domain of the industrial property are not at the same level with the Union?s standards and the quality of the protection is rather debatable since the protection is granted by a decree-laws regime instead of laws.The Article 61A relevant to the trademark crimes, which is subject to our present work, did not exixt in the first version of the Decree-law No.556 Relevant to the protection of Trademarks and added a few months later by the Law No.4128. Although the article relevant to the trademark crimes is inserted by a law, the regulation of such an important area with a decree-law as well as the determination of the acts which constitute trademark crimes with reference to the other articles of the decree-law caused multiple problems within the doctrine and the practice areas as this formulation violates the legality principle of the criminal law which is essential.The ongoing debates as from 1995, has gained a new dimension in the light of a recent decision of the Turkish Constitutional Court regarding the annulations of the some dispositions of the Decree-law and the replacement of the annulated articles with the new ones by the Law No. 5833 dated January 28, 2009.This present work, firstly gives a general explanation regarding the industrial property rights and trademark rights and their protection as well as the actual intern and international regulations which represent a model for the Turkish regulations in order to show the general outline of the protection system for the trademarks.In the second part, the general qualities and particularities of the trademark crimes in terms of the Article 61/A of the Decree-law No.556 examined pursuant to the criminal law technique.