What is a Community Tradmark or CTM?

They help deliver brand recognition, in logos for example, and play an important role in marketing and communication. It is possible to register a variety of trade marks including words, other graphical representations, and even sounds. Rights owners have a choice of obtaining protection on a country-by-country basis, or using international systems.

The Community trade mark (CTM), administered by OHIM, was introduced in 1996 to cover the whole of the European Union and is valid in all 27 Member States. To date, OHIM has registered more than one million trade marks on behalf of hundreds of thousands of companies from all over the world, and this total is increasing rapidly every year.