Glossary
French: marque internationale
An international trademark is a registration filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva under the Madrid System — the same system US applicants use through the USPTO as office of origin. WIPO acts as a single window, centralizing requests made in several countries at once and transmitting them to each national trademark office.
The international registration requires a prior basic mark on which it is founded — for a French company, typically a French trademark filed at the INPI; for a US company, a US application or registration. Protection is then requested country by country: each designation is analyzed under each national law as a separate national mark, and each designation is independent of the others. There is no unitary effect — in that respect the Madrid route is the opposite of the EU trademark, which the Madrid System can itself designate.
During the first five years following the international filing, the dependency principle applies: if the basic mark is cancelled during that period, the international registration ceases to exist. Attacking the basic mark within those five years to bring down the whole international registration is known as the central attack — a risk US in-house counsel will recognize from Madrid practice, and a reason to make sure the basic mark rests on a solid clearance search. Madrid does provide a safety net: if a central attack succeeds, the holder can seek transformation, converting the affected national designations into ordinary national or regional applications that keep the original filing and priority dates — the international registration disappears, but the underlying rights are not automatically lost everywhere.
Once granted, an international registration lasts ten years from the registration date, renewable indefinitely — the same baseline term used across the national and regional laws it designates. One of the System’s practical advantages is that renewal is centralized too: rather than renewing each national or regional registration separately with its own office and its own deadline, the holder files a single renewal request with WIPO covering every active designation at once.
Centralizing the filing does not centralize the scrutiny. Once WIPO transmits a designation to the relevant office, that office examines it under its own law exactly as it would a directly filed application. A US designation, for instance, receives the same substantive review as a US-filed application, including full Section 2(d) likelihood-of-confusion examination by a USPTO examining attorney; an EU designation is examined by the EUIPO under EU law; a French designation is examined by the INPI under the French Intellectual Property Code. The Madrid System shortens and simplifies the paperwork, not the substantive standard applied at each destination.
Consider a US company that owns a US trademark registration and wants coverage in France, Germany and Japan without filing three separate national applications. It can file a single international application through the USPTO as office of origin, designating those three Madrid members through WIPO. The result is one WO-numbered registration that functions, for practical purposes, as three independent national rights — each governed by its own national law and vulnerable to its own local challenges, but administered and renewed through a single WIPO record.
An international registration is typically the next step after a first French trademark registration or EU trademark registration, once protection needs to reach beyond Europe — see international trademark (Madrid Protocol) for the filing mechanics. Because so much rides on the basic mark during the five-year dependency window, always run a trademark clearance search in each target country before designating it. See also priority right and trademark filing.