On 14 January 2019, the (Austrian) Trade Mark Amendment Act 2018, came into force implementing the Directive 2015/2436/EU on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to trade marks. The first step towards implementing the Directive was already taken with the 2017 Trade Mark Amendment Act, Federal Law Gazette I 2017/124, which largely entered into force on 1 September 2017. In this first step, those parts of the Directive which required a longer preparation period (such as the change in the calculation of the ten-year term of protection) or enabled a rapid lowering of the administrative and financial entry thresholds (especially with regard to the needs of start-ups and SMEs) were implemented. In this blog post, Veronika Krickl explains the most important changes resulting from these amendments (German only).
