Glossary
French: INPI (Institut national de la propriété industrielle)
The Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI) is the French office in charge of trademarks, designs and patents — France’s counterpart to the USPTO. It is based in Courbevoie, in the Paris area.
French trademark filings are made with the INPI, with the corresponding official fees (see INPI fees). The INPI also handles renewals and recordals: in case of assignment, merger or corporate transformation, changes of ownership must be recorded with the INPI (see trademark owner).
The INPI acts as an administrative authority and issues decisions in opposition proceedings. It also has jurisdiction over post-registration disputes concerning French marks: revocation for deceptiveness, for non-use and for genericide, as well as invalidity actions based on prior rights — functions comparable to the TTAB’s cancellation jurisdiction. Adverse INPI decisions can be appealed to the competent Court of Appeal — most often the Paris Court of Appeal, depending on jurisdictional rules.
The INPI’s substantive review on filing is narrower than the USPTO’s. An INPI examiner checks only absolute grounds — distinctiveness, descriptiveness, deceptiveness, public order — and does not search the register for conflicting earlier marks: an application is not refused merely because an identical or confusingly similar mark already exists. A US examining attorney, by contrast, routinely refuses registration under Section 2(d) of the Lanham Act on the strength of an earlier registration alone, without the earlier owner having to act. In France, that risk is left entirely to the earlier owner: if no opposition is filed within the two-month, non-extendable window running from BOPI publication, the later mark proceeds to registration regardless of how close it comes to an existing one. This makes an independent clearance search before filing considerably more important in France than US filers may be used to relying on the examiner to catch conflicts.
A French INPI mark can serve as the basic mark for an international registration filed with WIPO, and as the basis of a priority claim for a later EUIPO filing.
A US skincare company planning to sell only in France, with no immediate EU-wide ambitions, may choose to file directly with the INPI rather than with the EUIPO: a French-only filing is cheaper (see INPI fees) and, once the non-use grace period runs, is only vulnerable to revocation for non-use if the mark is not used in France specifically, rather than anywhere in the EU. If the company later expands across the bloc, that same INPI registration can serve as the priority basis for an EUIPO filing, or as the basic mark for a Madrid Protocol application reaching well beyond Europe.
INPI stands for propriété industrielle (industrial property), not intellectual property: the INPI does not handle copyright. In France, copyright arises without any formality — any original work is protected upon creation. (The INPI does handle some adjacent matters, such as software pledges.)
You will deal directly with the INPI whenever you pursue French trademark registration, face or bring a trademark opposition before the INPI, or handle a trademark renewal or fee question (see trademark fees & costs). For the EU-wide counterpart to the INPI, see EUIPO; for the INPI’s weekly official gazette, see BOPI.