Laut gegen Nazis e.V., a German anti-fascist NGO, has secured trademark rights at the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) to a portfolio of neo-Nazi codes and abbreviations — and has now used those registrations to shut down Druck18, described as Germany's largest online Nazi merchandise shop, according to a press release published in August 2025.

The campaign, called Rights Against the Right, was developed with Hamburg advertising agency Jung von Matt. Its mechanism is straightforward: by registering neo-Nazi codes as trademarks, the campaign acquires legal standing to block commercial use of those marks — stripping far-right vendors of the intellectual property they depend on to operate openly.

The Trademark Strategy

Neo-Nazi subcultures have long relied on coded language and numerology to evade the legal bans on explicit Nazi symbology that exist in Germany and several other European jurisdictions. Abbreviations and phonetic substitutions — such as "enness," a rendering of the initials for National Socialism — allow merchandise to circulate without triggering direct prohibition. Creative Review reported in February 2026 that these codes are deliberately designed to diffuse racist ideology while staying beneath the threshold of outright bans.

Rights Against the Right turned that evasion strategy against itself. By filing for trademark protection on the very codes that hate groups use, the campaign claims legal priority over the marks. Any commercial entity — including an online shop like Druck18 — that prints or sells goods bearing those marks potentially infringes on Laut gegen Nazis' intellectual property. The campaign also runs its own apparel line using the trademarked codes, fulfilling the commercial-use requirement that sustains a trademark registration's validity.

The Guardian noted in January 2024 that the campaign described its trademark filings as "just the beginning," signaling an intent to expand the portfolio beyond its initial registrations. The Druck18 action, announced more than a year later, appears to be the first high-profile enforcement milestone.

Legal Terrain and Precedent

Trademark law is a blunt and somewhat paradoxical tool for this purpose. Registering offensive or ideologically charged marks has historically been contested in multiple jurisdictions. A 2017 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the disparagement clause of the Lanham Act opened the door to offensive trademark filings in the United States, and Reuters reported at the time that hate groups moved quickly to exploit that opening.

The EU framework operates differently. The EUIPO can refuse marks that are contrary to public policy or accepted principles of morality — yet Laut gegen Nazis successfully registered these codes, presumably because the applicant's anti-fascist purpose was legible to examiners. How the registrations would hold up if contested by a commercial counterparty remains an open question; trademark offices and courts are not required to look through the legal form to the political intent behind a filing.

What is operationally significant is that the campaign does not need to win a court battle to create friction. The threat of infringement proceedings is enough to deter smaller vendors, raise compliance costs, and destabilize the commercial infrastructure that funds extremist organizing. Druck18's apparent inability to continue operating under its own brand name illustrates that deterrent effect in practice.

Wider Context

The trademarking campaign sits alongside other legislative efforts to constrain the far right's organizational and commercial capacity. In May 2026, Australia criminalized the National Socialist Network under legislation banning designated hate groups — a harder-edged approach that targets organizational existence rather than commerce. The two strategies are not mutually exclusive; jurisdictions without group-ban statutes can use commercial-law tools like trademark, while those with stronger legislative frameworks can pursue direct prohibition.

The symbolic dimension of the Rights Against the Right campaign has also traveled. By publishing the trademarked codes through its own merchandise, Laut gegen Nazis effectively publicizes the decoder ring for neo-Nazi iconography, making the covert lexicon legible to a general audience. That exposure function — stripping the codes of their operational obscurity — may prove as consequential as any single legal enforcement action.

Jung von Matt's involvement places this squarely in the tradition of adversarial branding, where the tools of commercial communication are redirected against the interests of a target actor. Whether EUIPO registration can be maintained at scale, as the campaign files for more marks, will determine how durable this model becomes.