Intellectual property is the structural backbone of every modern technology, brand, and creative business, and the architecture under which IP is created, owned, protected, monetized, and defended determines whether innovation produces durable economic value or evaporates at the first competitive challenge. Vircon Legal advises founders, growth-stage operators, and corporate groups on the full IP lifecycle: from clean ownership at inception through enforcement at maturity and commercialization at exit.
Our IP practice covers:
- Patent strategy and prosecution. Filing strategy, prior-art assessment, claim drafting, and international portfolio management for both software and hardware-driven inventions, including coordination with foreign patent counsel.
- Trademark portfolio management. Clearance searches, multi-jurisdictional filings, opposition and cancellation proceedings, brand-enforcement campaigns, and Madrid Protocol coordination across target markets.
- Copyright and design rights. Authorship assignments, license structures, work-for-hire frameworks, and industrial design registrations: particularly relevant for SaaS products and consumer brands.
- Software IP and open-source compliance. Source code ownership, contributor agreements, SPDX inventory, dual-licensing strategies: integrates closely with our SaaS & IT Contracts practice.
- Trade secrets and confidential information. NDA frameworks, employee invention assignment, departing-employee protocols, and trade-secret protection programs.
- IP in M&A and financing transactions. Diligence, representations & warranties, IP carve-outs, and licensing structures: coordinated with our M&A and fund teams.
- AI and training data IP. Output ownership, training data licensing, generative AI commercial frameworks: see AI & Algorithm Law.
- Enforcement and dispute resolution. Cease-and-desist campaigns, customs interventions, civil and criminal IP enforcement, and platform takedown procedures.
For founders preparing fundraising rounds, IP cleanliness is one of the first items on every investor’s VC Due Diligence Checklist. We work with portfolio companies of leading venture funds and corporate venture units across Türkiye, the US, and Europe: ensuring that IP holdings are both defensible and commercially flexible. Our glossary covers core IP terminology used in these workflows.
Who owns what in a Turkish technology company
- Employees. Unless the contract or the nature of the work says otherwise, the economic rights in works created by employees in the course of their job are exercised by the employer (Law on Intellectual and Artistic Works No. 5846, Art. 18(2)); service inventions follow the Industrial Property Law No. 6769, Arts. 113 to 122, with a compensation right for the inventor.
- Founders and freelancers. There is no statutory default. Code a founder wrote before incorporation, and work by contractors and agencies, belongs to them until a written contract assigns it, listing the rights transferred one by one (FSEK, Art. 52); an outright transfer of future works is void (Art. 48).
- Moral rights. Attribution and integrity stay with the author; the company holds economic rights such as reproduction, distribution, adaptation and communication to the public.
- Trade marks. Protection in Türkiye comes from registration with TÜRKPATENT, not from use (SMK, Art. 7), for ten years from filing and renewable (Art. 23). A mark registered in a founder’s personal name and never assigned is a common diligence finding.
Questions clients ask us
Does our company own the code its developers write?
For employees acting in the course of their job, the company exercises the economic rights by default under FSEK Article 18(2), and a clear clause in the employment contract removes doubt. For founders who wrote code before the company existed, and for freelancers and agencies, the company owns nothing until a written assignment lists the rights transferred individually (Getting the IP Into the Company).
When should we register our trade mark?
Before launch. Protection in Türkiye is acquired by registration, so a third party can file first for a brand you have been using. Run a clearance search, file in the Nice classes you will actually use within five years (unused marks become vulnerable to cancellation), and register in the company’s name. An unopposed application typically registers within about a year; anyone may oppose within two months of publication (Trade Mark Strategy for a Turkish Startup).
Can software be patented in Türkiye?
Computer programs as such are excluded from patent protection (Industrial Property Law, Art. 82), but an invention that produces a technical effect beyond the normal interaction of program and computer can be patentable. Most software companies rely on copyright, which arises automatically, together with trade-secret discipline and clean assignment documents.
How do we move IP to a foreign parent after a flip-up?
By a written transfer that meets FSEK’s form rules, at a price that will survive a transfer-pricing review, and with records that will satisfy the next buyer’s diligence. A token price between related companies invites a tax question, and an incomplete assignment invites a diligence question (Transferring IP to Your Foreign Parent).
Who owns output generated with AI tools?
Under FSEK a work must carry the personal mark of its author (Art. 1/B), so output produced without meaningful human creative input is hard to protect, while the human contributions around it can be. Training on third-party works is a separate question with narrower grounds in Türkiye than under the EU’s text-and-data-mining exceptions (Who Owns AI Output?).
Reading
- How GPL Contamination Kills a Funding Round: The Open Source License Audit
- Feeding Company Data to a Model: KVKK Basis, Transfer Abroad and Trade Secrets
Sources. Law No. 5846 on Intellectual and Artistic Works and Industrial Property Law No. 6769. Statute links open the official consolidated Turkish texts on mevzuat.gov.tr.
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