Glossary
French: BOPI — Bulletin Officiel de la Propriété Industrielle
The BOPI is the Bulletin Officiel de la Propriété Industrielle — roughly “boh-PEE” — France’s official industrial property gazette, the counterpart of the USPTO’s Official Gazette. It is published every Friday by the INPI.
The BOPI has two parts:
When it was still issued on paper, each BOPI contained a black-and-white section followed by a color section. Trademark applications are published with the sign always presented in an 8 cm × 8 cm square — a limitation that digitization has not removed, and one that can matter for figurative or color marks whose proportions or shading do not translate cleanly into that fixed format.
Because the two-month opposition deadline runs from the Friday BOPI I publication and is not extendable, the publication date functions as a hard trigger, not merely an FYI notice. A US brand owner monitoring French filings needs the BOPI checked every single week without exception — missing even one Friday’s issue can mean missing the entire opposition window for a conflicting filing, with no second chance and no equivalent of a TTAB extension of time to oppose to buy more room.
For now, only the BOPI has official legal value. The INPI’s online trademark database has no legal effect. When evidence of a French filing or registration is needed (for example in litigation or opposition proceedings), it is therefore recommended to rely on the BOPI itself rather than a simple database extract. The BOPI is available as a PDF, and each trademark record in the INPI’s database includes a download link to the relevant BOPI pages. In practice, French counsel will typically append the relevant BOPI excerpt as an exhibit rather than a screenshot of the online register, precisely because only the former carries evidentiary weight before a court or the opposition division.
US practitioners can think of the distinction as similar to that between the Official Gazette and TESS: convenient search tools are not official publications. The Official Gazette likewise starts the opposition clock before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board — the BOPI plays the identical procedural role for the INPI, only with a fixed, non-extendable window rather than the more flexible timeline TTAB practice allows through extensions of time to oppose.
A US company monitoring the French market for conflicting filings of its brand will typically receive a weekly alert flagging any BOPI I entry that resembles its mark, in the classes it cares about. If nothing appears within two months of the relevant Friday publication, the application proceeds to registration unopposed — the INPI does not screen for conflicting prior marks on its own, so silence at this stage is final for opposition purposes, though a later revocation or invalidity action may still be available on other grounds.
The BOPI publication date is the anchor for the entire timeline in responding to a trademark opposition and in running a proactive trademark watch. See also French trademark, registration certificate, and trademark opposition.