The 2016 Trademark Act B.E. 2558 paved the way to registration of sound marks in Thailand, adopting commonly agreed criteria to assess the distinctiveness of such a mark:
(1) the mark must not directly refer to the character or the quality of the goods it is attached to;
(2) it must not mimic the natural sounds of the goods; and
(3) the sound used must not result from the functioning of the goods the mark is attached to.
In the absence of any implementation provisions, this remained a dead letter until new Ministerial Regulations and corresponding Guidelines were adopted on September 1st, 2017. Read together, these texts set out a number of rules to be followed when filing an application for the registration of a sound mark.
According to these rules, the applicant must clearly describe the sound mark on the application form, which involves indicating the type of sound used (human, animal, musical or else), specifying in which context the mark will be used and describing the melody using conventional music notations. Moreover, the application will have to include a recording of the sound mark, which can be submitted via CDs or USB keys. Supplementary documents further describing the sound mark may be filed with the application to facilitate the routine similarity-check.
