Colour Trademarks in Nepal: How Far Can a Colour Alone Go?
Can a single colour be a trademark in Nepal? How the PDTA treats colour marks, what examiners accept in practice, and the safer ways to protect brand colours.
Your brand colour is doing more work than your logo — it is on the shop shelf, the van, the packaging, the staff shirts. At some point the question arrives: can we own the colour itself in Nepal?
The honest answer under the current law is more cautious than the marketing team would like — and there is a filing strategy that gets you most of the practical protection anyway.
In short
Nepal's Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act protects marks consisting of words, names, devices, labels and combinations of these — wording that does not comfortably accommodate a single colour claimed per se. The practical route for a colour trademark in Nepal is to claim colour within a device, label or composite mark: the filing specifies where the colour sits, the distinctiveness comes from the whole, and the registration still fences the brand's look. A colour asserted alone needs long, documented use to argue distinctiveness — and even then the safer scope is the composite.
What the Act's wording allows
Section 18's framework in the Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act, 2022 BS (1965) describes trademarks as words, names, devices, labels or combinations — the categories Nepal's practice has built four decades of examination around. Nothing in that list squarely names a colour without limits, and the Department has no settled per se colour practice comparable to jurisdictions where colour marks registered after decades of use.
The consequence is practical, not philosophical: an application claiming "the colour green" as such invites a distinctiveness objection the examiner can support from the statute's own wording. An application for a device or label in which the colour is a claimed feature examines like any other composite mark — the normal track, with normal odds.
The composite trademark filing: claiming colour where it lives
The workable Nepalese strategy claims the colour inside something the Act recognises. A label mark can specify that the background is claimed in a stated colour; a device mark can claim the figurative element rendered in the brand colour; a three-dimensional packaging mark can claim the shape in combination with its colouring.
The four printed specimens filed with a Schedule 1(c) application — labels of roughly 8×8 cm in practice — should reproduce the colour consistently, and the specification or particulars should state clearly that colour is claimed as a feature rather than left ambiguous. Ambiguity is the enemy: if the examiner cannot tell whether the colour is claimed, the objection writes itself.
| Route | What is claimed | Examination posture |
|---|---|---|
| Colour per se | A single colour, no limits | Not supported by settled practice under the PDTA wording — high refusal risk |
| Label mark with colour feature | The whole label, colour specified | Standard examination; distinctiveness comes from the composite |
| Device/logo in brand colour | The figurative mark as coloured | Standard; colour part of the claimed sign |
| Packaging shape + colour | 3D form with its colouring | Examines as a device; overlaps design law — file both if the look matters |
Distinctiveness and the long-use argument
Where a colour really has become the brand — a specific shade consumers recognise on the shelf — the distinctiveness argument is built from use, and Nepalese practice rewards documented use in every dispute context. The evidence file: dated sales figures, advertising spend, packaging generations, distributor statements, and photographs showing the colour in trade over years.
That file serves two purposes. It supports the registrability argument if a colour-forward application is attempted, and it does the practical enforcement work regardless: a lookalike competitor challenged on the composite registered mark does not need a per se colour right to lose.
The design-law companion
Where the colour lives on packaging or a product form, industrial design registration is the cheaper second layer: NPR 1,000 to file and NPR 7,000 to register at the Department of Industry, protecting the look — shape, pattern, ornamentation, and the colouring as applied — for 5 years, renewable twice to a 15-year ceiling. The design right does not need distinctiveness; it needs the representations to show the colour clearly.
Layered this way, the trademark fences the brand's identifying elements indefinitely through renewals, while the design right covers the product's appearance through its commercial prime. It is the combination, not the colour claim, that does the protecting.
What the proposed Bill would change in Nepal
The Industrial Property Bill 2082, still in the parliamentary process, would modernise the definition of registrable signs — the kind of statutory update that in other jurisdictions opened the door to non-traditional marks. Until it is enacted and its final text is known, the PDTA governs: plan the filing around composite marks, and revisit the per se colour question when the new law lands.
For now, the practical rule stands: in Nepal, colour is protected as part of a mark, not instead of one.
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This article is general information, not legal advice.