The Protection of Non-Traditional Trade Marks within the European Union

The aim of this paper is to talk about Non-traditional marks among European Countries, with a particular attention on Community Trademark legislation. By analyzing the “state of art” of Non-traditional marks, this paper focuses on three kinds of Non-Traditional marks (TM): Sound marks, Motion marks and Fluid trademarks. After discussing the hurdles on the path to registering sound and motion marks, the paper will focus on “fluid trademarks”, which are currently not considered a new trademark category, but offer a good example of the evolution of trademark strategies. Indeed, these three kinds of innovative marks represent a challenge to national jurisdictions due to their dynamism, which makes it difficult to satisfy the graphical representation requirement. In order to allow the development of these new kinds of trademarks, the removal of the graphic representation requirement from the TM Directives and the Community TM Regulation might be a radical but indeed effective solution. As will be argued in this paper, the conflict between the graphical representation requirement and the dynamism of such trademarks might be solved better by technological advancements