Brand protection
The Federal Office for Defence Procurement armasuisse is responsible for brand protection and registration of the military brands at home and abroad. Brand protection is carried out in cooperation with external trademark lawyers and with the contractual partners of armasuisse within the framework of brand licence agreements.
While armasuisse pursued trademark protection at the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s primarily as a supplement and support in favour of Victorinox for the «Swiss Army» brand, considerable investments have now also been made in the protection of the «Swiss Military» and «Swiss Air Force» brands. The principle of speciality must be observed in trademark protection, according to which a product name cannot be protected in general, but only for very specific goods and services. In the case of comprehensive, broad-based trade mark protection, as in the case of the Confederation's military trade marks, a correspondingly large number of categories of goods (classes according to the international Nice Classification) must be protected.
armasuisse supports licence holders in enforcing their trademark rights. The focus is on the defence against trademark piracy by mostly foreign companies that do not comply with the «Swissness» regulations or commit infringements of the military trademarks. Even in Switzerland, military trademarks may only be used with the authorisation of armasuisse. armasuisse is free to decide whether a case should be investigated and prosecuted. The criteria are in particular
- the strategic significance of trademark protection in a specific case;
- the prospects of success of any legal action;
- the required financial resources to pay the legal costs.
In two leading decisions ( see Swiss Military - B-6372/2010 of 31.01.2011; Swiss Military - B 850/2016 of 22.1.2018), the Federal Administrative Court granted the federal military marks a special status and qualified them as official signs in accordance with Art. 6 of the Coat of Arms Protection Act. This means that no one in Switzerland may use a sign that is identical or confusingly similar to the military marks without authorisation from armasuisse. The protection as an official sign strengthens the protection under trade mark law.