Since 11 December 2025, Argentina’s National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) has stopped doing something it did for decades: checking on its own initiative whether a new trademark application resembles a mark already registered or applied for by someone else. INPI Resolution 583/2025 limited ex officio examination to absolute and public-order grounds —signs lacking distinctiveness, designations of origin, official symbols, marks contrary to morality— and left the so-called relative grounds to be raised by third parties through oppositions. Among them, the most important for any owner: similarity with an earlier mark (Section 3(b), Law 22,362), as well as misleading indications of the nature or origin of goods, the use of a person’s name or likeness without consent, and descriptive designations of activities.
What changed, in practice
Until December, if someone applied for a mark confusingly similar to a client’s, the INPI would object even if nobody opposed. It was a free, silent safety net. That net is gone: if the owner of the earlier mark does not oppose within the 30 calendar days following publication in the Trademark Gazette, the confusing mark is granted. The INPI still refuses ex officio marks that are identical to earlier ones; what it let go is the whole universe of similar marks, which is where most conflicts arise.
Since 1 March 2026, the resolution also changed the order of the procedure: formal and substantive examination now take place before publication, not after, as the text of the law provided. In practice, an application either goes through clean and fast —examination, publication, 30 days, grant— or is objected to before it reaches the Gazette. From the same date, under Resolution 63/2026, notifications in trademark proceedings are electronic and time limits run from the following day.
What it means for trademark owners in Argentina
The INPI explains it with a reasonable argument: a trademark is a private right, and its owner should decide whether to defend it; the State should not create conflicts over rights their owners have no interest in protecting. It is the same approach as the European Union Intellectual Property Office. But the consequence is that the burden of detection has shifted from the office to the owner.
In our own figures: in a typical week the Trademark Gazette publishes more than two thousand new applications, in four issues. Finding among them the one that resembles a mark in the portfolio —including composite marks, where the word sits inside the logo rather than in the text— and doing so within thirty days is now the difference between keeping exclusivity and living with a registered imitator.
Three things worth checking:
- That the mark is under watch. Being registered is not enough; someone has to read the Gazette every week with the portfolio in hand.
- That the watch covers similar marks, not just identical ones. Identical ones are still stopped by the INPI; those that change a letter, a vowel or the word order are not.
- That defensive marks are actually defended. A mark registered “to hold ground” no longer clears the field by itself: it only works if its owner opposes when someone gets close.
At the firm we adapted our weekly watch to this regime: every published application is compared against the whole portfolio —text and logos— and every match is assessed before the opposition deadline expires. If you own a mark in Argentina and are not sure it is being watched, now is the time to ask.
Sources: INPI Resolution 583/2025, Official Gazette of 11/12/2025 (Section 1 in force from that date; Section 2 from 1/3/2026); INPI Resolution 63/2026, Official Gazette of 26/02/2026, in force from 1/3/2026; Law 22,362, Sections 3, 12, 13 and 47 (as amended by Law 27,444). Written on 11/09/2026.
