Glossary
French: priorité
Priority is the rule allowing an applicant who makes a first trademark filing to file another mark — same sign, same goods and services, same owner — in another country within six months, with the legal effect of the second filing backdated to the first filing date. US practitioners know it as Paris Convention priority, the same mechanism as Section 44(d) claims before the USPTO: a US applicant who files at home and then files in France or before the EUIPO within the six-month window is treated, for purposes of determining who has the earlier right, as if the foreign filing had been made on the original US filing date. That backdating matters directly against intervening filings, uses, or publications that occur between the two dates — priority can be the difference between winning and losing a race against a third party who files or starts using a similar mark in the interim.
Priority must be claimed at the time of filing. Proof of the first filing date is required: a scanned copy of the official certified copy issued by the office of first filing. Unlike some of the other formalities in French trademark practice, this one is not an area where the INPI extends much flexibility.
At the INPI, the priority document must be translated into French and filed within three months of the French filing date. If the document and its translation are not provided within that window, priority is refused and deemed never claimed — and the INPI sends no reminder of the three-month deadline. For a US applicant extending a US-priority mark to France, this is the trap to calendar: nothing in the prosecution correspondence flags the missed deadline before it is too late, and the loss of priority is not always immediately visible in the file — it can surface only much later, when the filing date turns out to matter, for instance in an opposition or in litigation.
When claiming the priority of a French mark in an EU filing, no translation is needed — French is an official EU language. And where the supporting document is missing, the EUIPO’s practice is to verify the first filing itself rather than issue a deficiency notice. EUIPO practice is thus more forgiving than the INPI’s, which is one more reason US applicants extending protection to Europe should not assume that a procedure that worked smoothly at the EUIPO will be equally forgiving at the INPI, or vice versa.
A US company files a US application for its mark on a given date. Four months later, having decided to expand into Europe, it instructs French counsel to file both a French national mark and an EU trademark claiming priority from the US filing. The EUIPO filing is straightforward. At the INPI, however, counsel must also calendar the three-month deadline to file the certified priority document and its French translation — a formality with no equivalent step, and no reminder, on the EU side.
Priority comes up any time a mark is being extended from one jurisdiction to another within the Paris Convention window — during French trademark registration, EU trademark registration, or when filing through the international trademark (Madrid) system. It can also become decisive in a trademark opposition before the INPI or the EUIPO, where the effective filing date determines whose right is earlier. See also: trademark filing, seniority.