Glossary
French: marque de l'Union européenne
A European Union trademark covers all countries of the European Union through a single registration filed at the EUIPO. The official fee starts at €850 for one class, with €50 for a second class and €150 for each class beyond that (see trademark fees and costs). For a US company, one EUTM filing replaces up to 27 national filings, and — absent opposition — typically registers in roughly four months, faster than the corresponding national route in most member states.
The EUTM is unitary: it is valid in every EU member state as one indivisible right. The flip side: if an EU application is opposed on the basis of a single national mark — say, one earlier Spanish registration — and the opposition succeeds, the EU application is refused in its entirety, for all 27 countries. This is the central trade-off a US applicant needs to weigh at the filing-strategy stage: broader coverage for a lower blended cost, against a single point of failure that a purely national filing does not have.
The safety net is conversion: the defeated application can be converted into national applications, keeping the EU filing date (and therefore its seniority over intervening rights) in the countries not affected by the opposition decision. In the Spanish-opposition example, conversion is available into a French mark and into national marks of every EU country except Spain. Conversion carries its own official fees in each destination country and is not automatic — it must be requested within a set period after the refusal becomes final, so it should be planned for, not treated as a fallback discovered too late.
An EUTM application also passes through the EUIPO’s cooling-off period once opposed — an initial two months, extendable by agreement up to roughly two years in total — during which the parties can negotiate a settlement or a coexistence agreement before formal adversarial proceedings begin.
There is no US federal registration that works like the EUTM’s unitary system, because the US is a single sovereign with a single federal trademark register — the closest domestic analogy is not a filing mechanism but the geographic scope of a federal Lanham Act registration versus common-law state rights. The EUTM’s real US parallel is procedural: like a USPTO application, an EUTM application is examined for absolute grounds and published for opposition, and third parties can oppose within a fixed window. But the EUTM adds a risk that USPTO practice does not have — a single national right anywhere in 27 countries can sink registration everywhere, an exposure a US applicant with only USPTO experience tends to underestimate until it is explained.
A US software company wants EU-wide protection for its brand and files a single EUTM application rather than 27 national applications. During the opposition period, a small manufacturer in Spain opposes based on an earlier, purely national Spanish registration for similar goods. If the opposition succeeds, the EUTM application is refused entirely — but the US company converts it into national applications in the other 26 member states, preserving its original EU filing date everywhere except Spain, where it must either negotiate with the Spanish owner or drop that market.
You will meet the EUTM at the very first filing-strategy conversation with US clients weighing EU trademark registration against a patchwork of national filings, and again whenever a US in-house team monitors EUIPO opposition risk from a single national right. It also comes up alongside an international trademark filed under the Madrid Protocol designating the EU, and it sits next to the French trademark as the two most common building blocks of a European filing strategy for a US brand owner.