Glossary
French: EUIPO (Office de l'Union européenne pour la propriété intellectuelle)
The EUIPO — European Union Intellectual Property Office — is the office created by the European Union to administer European Union trademarks and Community designs. Think of it as the USPTO’s counterpart for EU-wide trademark rights. The acronym EUIPO is used in all languages. The office was previously called OHIM (Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market; OHMI in French). It is located in Alicante, Spain, and all proceedings can be conducted entirely online. The EUIPO continuously develops tools for users, such as databases and goods-and-services comparison tools, and cooperates with national offices, notably the INPI.
The single most important structural fact for a US filer to internalize is that an EU trademark is a single, unitary right covering the entire European Union — one application, one registration, one renewal date, enforceable in every member state. There is no true equivalent at the US federal level: a US registration already covers every US state automatically, so the closer comparison is to imagine that same single-filing convenience extended across a group of separate sovereign countries, each with its own courts, language, and, for some purposes, its own earlier national rights capable of blocking or limiting the EU right. That unitary character cuts both ways: it is a major efficiency for a company expanding across Europe, but it also means a single earlier national right anywhere in the EU can defeat the whole application unless the applicant converts.
A mark filed at the EUIPO can be converted if it is rejected following an opposition based on a national mark. The EUIPO transmits the file to national offices, and the applicant can convert its EU application into national applications while keeping the original EU filing date. Example: an EU application defeated by an opposition based on a Spanish mark can be converted into a French application — and into national applications in every EU country except Spain. Conversion softens the “all or nothing” character of the EU trademark: losing an opposition does not mean losing every market, though it does mean paying separate national filing fees and, in each converted country, potentially engaging local counsel — a cost the applicant would have avoided by filing nationally from the outset, but a reasonable trade-off against the years of unitary protection already enjoyed up to that point.
The seniority claim — recording an earlier national mark (for example, a French INPI registration) against an EUTM — is another bridge between the national and EU levels. It lets the owner of both an earlier national registration and a later, otherwise identical EU registration allow the national registration to lapse without losing the rights that had accrued in that country, since the EUTM is deemed to carry forward the same seniority. See seniority for the mechanics.
There is no true US federal equivalent to the EUIPO’s role, because the US does not need a supranational filing system: a single USPTO registration already covers the entire country. The more useful comparison is functional rather than structural — the EUIPO, relative to the EU’s member states, functions somewhat like the USPTO relative to individual US states, in that it removes the need to file separately in each jurisdiction, while still allowing older, purely local or national rights to coexist with, and sometimes challenge, the broader registration.
The EUIPO is the office at the center of EU trademark registration and trademark opposition before the EUIPO; see the glossary entry on EUIPO opposition for the opposition procedure itself.