Glossary
French: déposant
The déposant is, in a French trademark filing, the person who will be the owner of the mark — its proprietor. As in US practice, the applicant is not the person who fills out the form: that person is the agent (mandataire, e.g. the trademark attorney) or the legal representative of the company.
An applicant can be an individual, a company, an association, or a public body — essentially any legal person capable of holding property rights. French law does not require the applicant to already be using the mark, or even to have a concrete business plan for every good or service listed, at the time of filing (contrast this with the US, where an intent-to-use application requires a bona fide intent to use the mark in commerce, and use must eventually be proven before registration issues). This is one of the more consequential differences for US filers: in France and at the EUIPO, a mark can be registered, maintained, and enforced for years without the owner ever using it for some or all of the goods and services listed, until a third party brings a revocation for non-use action once the grace period has run.
The applicant may assign all or part of the mark it has filed (see trademark assignment), so the applicant is not always the current owner of the mark. French records keep the historical notion of déposant alongside the current titulaire (owner); the EUIPO, by contrast, uses only the notion of “owner” in its online database — which, as the source materials of this glossary wryly note, is doubtless easier to understand. When reviewing a French trademark record, a US practitioner should not assume the original applicant is still the rights holder: the ownership chain should be checked through subsequent assignment recordals rather than read off the filing date alone.
A mark can be filed by several co-applicants who become co-owners, each holding an interest in the same registration rather than filing separate, parallel marks. Co-ownership works differently than joint filing under some other systems, and the respective rights of co-owners — to license, assign or oppose in their own name — are best fixed in a written agreement between them at the outset, since the statute leaves considerable room for dispute if the co-owners later disagree.
If the mark is filed in the name of a legal entity, the filing must be made by a person with authority to represent that entity to be valid. A French avocat (attorney) needs no power of attorney to represent one or several applicants before the INPI — a convenience compared to jurisdictions requiring executed POAs, and one that speeds up the practical mechanics of a filing instructed from abroad. The same convenience generally extends to EUIPO filings made through a professional representative.
One further point of care for US in-house teams: because French and EU applications do not require proof of use to register, a foreign subsidiary or even a distributor can sometimes end up listed as the applicant by mistake or convenience early in a market-entry process. Getting the applicant’s identity right from day one avoids a costly assignment exercise later to bring the registration back to the parent company that actually should own the brand.
The identity of the applicant matters at every stage: it is the first thing checked in a trademark clearance search, it determines who receives notice in an opposition (see trademark opposition), and it drives who must sign renewal and assignment paperwork. See also trademark owner and trademark filing for the filing process itself.