Swiss intellectual property rights explained

Which four rights does Swiss intellectual property law cover?

Trade marks, patents, designs and copyright — each governed by its own federal Act, and each with its own rules on how the right comes into existence and how long it lasts.

The four Acts are the Trade Mark Protection Act, the Patents Act, the Designs Act and the Copyright Act. Reading them side by side is more useful than reading any one of them alone, because the differences between them are where portfolios go wrong. Three of the four rights are created by an entry in a register; the fourth is created by the act of writing or drawing. Three run from a filing date; the fourth runs from a death. A portfolio that treats all four as variations of one concept will manage the last of them badly, and usually will not notice until someone asks what the organisation actually owns.

This page is about Swiss law specifically. Switzerland is not a member of the European Union, so none of what follows is derived from an EU instrument, and none of it can be assumed from an EU equivalent.

Which rights must be registered, and which arise on their own?

Trade marks, patents and designs require registration; copyright does not exist as a registered right at all.

The Trade Mark Protection Act is explicit that “a trade mark right is established on entry in the Register” (Art. 5), and the Designs Act uses the same construction: “a design right is established on entry in the Design Register” (Art. 5 para. 1). For both, the Act then answers the obvious follow-up question — who gets the right when two people want it — the same way: it “belongs to the person who first files” (TmPA Art. 6; DesA Art. 6). Switzerland is a first-to-file jurisdiction, and use without filing does not by itself produce a registered right.

Copyright works in the opposite direction. Under Art. 29 para. 1 of the Copyright Act, “a work is protected by copyright as soon as it is created, irrespective of whether it has been fixed on a physical medium.” There is nothing to file, no register to search, and no renewal to diarise. That sounds like the simple case and is in practice the hard one: an asset that needs no administration also generates no reminders, so the organisation’s record of what it owns depends entirely on someone having written it down at the time.

For a filing made first in another Paris Convention state, Art. 7 of the Trade Mark Protection Act allows the applicant to claim the earlier date in Switzerland, provided the Swiss filing takes place within six months of the first one. That six-month window is a hard limit, and it is the most common reason a Swiss filing that “was going to happen anyway” turns out to have lost its priority.

How long does each Swiss right last?

Four different answers, and none of them is a round number that can be carried over from another right.

A trade mark registration “is valid for 10 years from the date of filing the application” and is renewed for further ten-year periods (TmPA Art. 10 paras. 1–2). The renewal application must reach the Institute “within the last 12 months prior to the expiry of the term of validity, but not later than six months after its expiry” (para. 3) — so there is a window that opens before expiry and a grace period that closes after it, and both are part of the deadline rather than decoration around it.

A patent runs differently: “the maximum term of the patent is 20 years from the filing date of the application” (PatA Art. 14). It is a maximum, not a guarantee, and it is not renewable in the trade mark sense.

A design starts short and is extended in steps. Protection “is for five years from the filing date” and “may be extended for four periods of five years each” (DesA Art. 5 paras. 2–3) — twenty-five years in total if every extension is taken, arriving as five separate decisions rather than one.

Copyright is measured from a person, not a filing. Protection expires 70 years after the death of the author for most works, and 50 years after the death of the author for computer programs (CopA Art. 29 para. 2). A term that depends on a date of death is a term no docketing system can calculate from its own records, which is the practical reason copyright sits outside most portfolio tooling.

What does the Swiss register hold, and what does it not?

It holds the three registered rights and says nothing about the fourth.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property administers the trade mark, patent and design registers, and those registers are the authoritative record of what exists, in whose name, and until when. The Institute is also the body a trade mark renewal is filed with, named as such in the Act’s own renewal provision.

What no Swiss register holds is copyright. There is no register to consult, so there is no external authority to reconcile an internal record against — the question “does the organisation own this?” has no lookup, only evidence. Authorship, commissioning terms, employment relationships and assignment documents are the record, and they live in contracts and files rather than in a register entry. An audit that checks the registers and stops has audited three of the four rights.

Which court decides a Swiss patent dispute?

The Federal Patent Court, which “has exclusive jurisdiction in civil matters relating to both the validity and the infringement of patents.”

The court began operating on 1 January 2012 and its seat is in St. Gallen. Its decisions can be appealed to the Federal Supreme Court. Two things follow for anyone managing a portfolio with Swiss patents in it. The first is that validity and infringement are heard by the same specialist court rather than split between forums, which shapes how disputes are run. The second is more mundane and more often relevant: Swiss patent litigation has a single, identifiable first-instance source of decisions, so the question of what a Swiss court has actually held is answerable rather than diffuse.

Does a European Union right cover Switzerland?

No. A Swiss right is established under a Swiss Act and, for the three registered rights, by an entry in a Swiss register.

This is the assumption worth checking explicitly, because it is cheap to check and expensive to get wrong. The Trade Mark Protection Act creates the trade mark right on entry in the Swiss register; nothing in it makes an entry elsewhere a substitute. The same holds for designs. A portfolio that shows European coverage and treats Switzerland as included has an unprotected market, and the discovery usually comes at enforcement, when the remedy is no longer filing.

Practically, protection in Switzerland comes either from a national Swiss filing or from an international registration that designates Switzerland — and either way, the Swiss register is where the answer lives.

What does this mean for a portfolio that includes Switzerland?

Model the four rights separately, because the law does.

Concretely: hold the Swiss registered rights against the Swiss register rather than against a European summary, and record what the register actually said on the day it was checked. Diarise the trade mark renewal window as a window — the twelve months before expiry and the six months after — rather than as a single date. Treat each design extension as its own decision rather than assuming twenty-five years. Track patent term from the filing date, and keep a separate record for copyright-bearing assets, because nothing external will remind anyone that they exist.

A revision of the Patent Act takes effect on 1 January 2027 and changes national patent procedure, so any Swiss patent process documented against today’s rules will need re-reading before then. That is the ordinary condition of this work rather than an exception: the rule that applied when a case was filed is not always the rule that applies now, which is why a record that shows only a date, and not the rule that produced it, cannot be defended when it is questioned.