Short answer. In most of Europe, nobody tells you. Your registration does not come with a notification service attached.
That surprises people. It should not, but it does, because for a long time the opposite was true. The office was the gatekeeper, so you assumed the office would catch a copy of your name. Between 2016 and 2019 that stopped being the case across the European Union, one country at a time, as every member state moved to the same directive. The change was published in legal journals. It was never sent to the people it affected.
I spent last week reading three of these acts line by line, Czech, Slovak and Polish, and then the EU regulation and the US rules on top of them. This page puts them side by side, because five registers handle the exact same moment in five different ways.
The one line answer
None of the five registers below will reliably tell you that somebody filed a lookalike of your mark. Three send the owner nothing at all. The other two write, but only inside a narrow box that rarely contains the filing that actually hurts.
Czechia, silent since 1 January 2019
The Czech Industrial Property Office repealed section 6 of Act No. 441/2003 Coll. and did not put anything in its place. Since that date it does not check whether a new application matches an earlier registered mark. Distinctiveness, yes. Whether the sign belongs to somebody else, no.
Its own 2019 annual report says it plainly, it no longer determines ex officio whether the mark applied for is identical with an older one. It even adds that double identity is rare, which is small comfort when the ordinary near miss is the one that costs you.
The owner gets nothing. No letter, no email, no flag in the file. The application publishes in the Vestnik and a three month clock starts, 1,000 CZK to oppose, and section 25(1) does not allow that clock to be extended or excused.
The full timeline is in Czechia stopped checking similar marks.
Slovakia, one narrow letter about exact copies
Slovakia changed the same rule on 14 January 2019 and left one small duty behind. Section 28(3) of Act No. 506/2009 Coll. still requires the office, before publication, to notify the applicant or the owner of the earlier mark when the sign is identical and the goods or services are identical too.
That is the whole duty. Same word, same class. A letter that a swapped letter, a doubled letter, a phonetic twin or a redrawn logo would never trigger, because similarity is no longer examined at all.
Good news if somebody files your exact name in your exact class. Silence for everything else, which is nearly everything.
More on that narrow letter in Slovakia still warns about trademark copies.
Poland, a letter addressed to the other side
Poland moved to an opposition system on 15 April 2016 and cut its own examination down to absolute grounds. But article 146(1)(6) of the Industrial Property Law keeps a similarity search alive. For an application heading for publication the office prepares a notice listing identical or similar earlier marks, with your name and your registration number in it.
It sends that notice to the applicant. The act calls the notice purely informational and not binding. You do not get a copy.
So the person who filed against you is told, by the state, that your mark exists. You find out three months later, if you happen to be looking. Opposition costs 600 PLN, runs three months from the bulletin, and the office states that the deadline cannot be reinstated.
Long version in Poland warns the applicant about your mark.
The EU does write, but only to EU mark owners
Brussels is not silent. It is just narrow, and the narrowness is easy to miss.
The EUIPO does not refuse an application because of an earlier similar mark. Relative grounds exist for an opposition, and the office's own FAQ says it does not examine them of its own volition. But article 43(7) of Regulation (EU) 2017/1001 adds something none of the three national acts above have. When an EU application is published, the office informs the proprietors of earlier EU marks cited in its search report, unless they have asked not to be told. EUIPO calls these surveillance letters, and it states that they are purely informative and are not a finding that a conflict exists.
So if you own an EU trade mark, a colliding EU application does reach you while the three month window is open. Two limits decide whether that helps you.
It covers EU marks and EU applications only. A Czech, Slovak or Polish national registration is invisible to that search, so the letter never comes.
And it fires on what the office's own automated search found, comparing the sign and the classes, not on the phonetic near miss, the homoglyph or the logo redraw that quietly eats your search results for years.
If your only protection is a national mark, nothing arrives from Brussels. Not even when the EU application covers your whole home market.
Both halves are stated plainly in the EUIPO help centre, on search availability and on opposition.
The US is the odd one out
Not because the system protects you, but because the examiner can refuse. Likelihood of confusion with an earlier registered mark is the most common reason a US application is refused, in the USPTO's own words on its likelihood of confusion page. A clean copy of your name often dies before it ever publishes, and you never hear about it, because the examiner writes to the applicant and not to you.
Often is not always. Similar in sound but not in spelling, or a related but different class, can walk straight through to publication and hand you 30 days to oppose.
The pattern nobody fixes
Every office on this page writes about one register. The Czech office writes about Czech filings. The Slovak office writes about one exact copy. Poland writes to the applicant. Brussels writes to EU mark owners about EU filings. The USPTO writes to the applicant.
No office writes to you about the filing that lands two countries over, in the class next door, under a name that sounds the same when a customer says it out loud.
That is the actual gap. It is structural, not a bug, and it is why the answer to "will the office tell me" is no, whichever register you ask.
What this changes about protecting a name
Not the legal part. A watch is not a legal opinion and it will not tell you whether to oppose. That call belongs to your attorney, and the answer depends on whether the marks really do collide.
What changes is the entry point. You cannot wait for a letter, because in Czechia there is no letter, in Slovakia there is one narrow letter, in Poland the letter goes to whoever filed, and in Brussels it only goes to EU mark owners.
Watching the registers is the only reliable way to see the filing while the window is still open. That is the job IP Defender does. Five AI watch agents and eleven detection layers score every new filing against the marks you own, across more than 50 countries, so a near miss reaches you in days instead of at renewal time. Prices are public, from 6 dollars a month per country, billed daily. No demo gate. It is a monitoring service, not a law firm.
Start with the register you actually trade in. Per country pricing is here.
What this page is not
It is not legal advice, and it is not a claim that these offices are doing something wrong. Each one follows its own act, each act follows the same European directive, and the practical result is that the monitoring duty sits with the owner now.
It also does not make a registration worthless. It means a registration is a right you have to notice being infringed before you can use it.
Sources I read for this page. Act No. 441/2003 Coll. as amended, Act No. 506/2009 Coll. section 28(3) and the Slovak office, the Polish Industrial Property Law and UPRP's opposition guide as cited in the Poland piece, Regulation (EU) 2017/1001 article 43(7) via the EUIPO help centre pages linked above, and the USPTO explanation of the likelihood of confusion test.