A Background Guide to International Trademark Law

The concept of territoriality provides the governing principle of international trademark law. The enforcement of trademark rights in individual nations does not come under the jurisdiction of international agencies but under local legal statutes. The key idea behind the various agreements and organizations responsible for international trademark rights, rather, is harmonization. This process is geared toward mitigating the limitations of territoriality by bringing the differing definitions of trademark rights held by various countries more closely in line with each other.

The observance of territoriality ensured that the earliest laws dealing with trademark rights were strictly national in scope. With the rapid growth in international commerce and early development of remote communication which occurred in the 19th century, industrial and government figures in the developed world felt an increasing need for some overall framework for international trademark law. The first move toward such a system came with the Paris Convention for the Protection of Intellectual Property, which began in 1883. In respect for the preeminence of territoriality, the Convention delegates agreed their purpose was "the creation of a union which, without encroaching on the municipal law of the contracting countries, would lay down a number of general principles securing the interests of industrial property in the interior of the country as well as abroad." Three years later, their efforts bore fruit in the signing of the first international trademark agreement by eleven countries. These initial signatory members all hailed from either Europe or Latin America; despite the United States' rise as an economic and social powerhouse at this time, it opposed several of the Convention's provisions and accordingly opted out. As of the early 21st century, the Paris Convention is still in effect as a foundation for international trademark law, with 173 signatory countries.

Though there is no international trademark law understood as a single statute dictating enforcement measures and penalties across a broad swath of the world, international agreements ensure that their signers have essentially the same understanding of what constitutes a trademark and of what rights are due to its owners. The World Trade Organization's Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights, or WTO TRIPS, for instance, went into effect in January 1995 after a session for debate and negotiation which lasted from 1986 to 1994, in what was known as the Uruguay Round. Among various agreements on intellectual property, Article 15(1) of the TRIPS agreement laid out a definition for the "signs" used in trademarks. International trademark rights are also guaranteed by the Madrid Protocol, which was adopted in 2004. It is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization, an agency of the United Nations. The Madrid system allows for trademark rights applied for in the prospective owner's home country to automatically apply to other nations as well. The observance of territoriality mandates, however, that complaints for trademark infringement be made to the specific jurisdictional authorities.

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