Glossary
French: dépôt de marque
The dépôt de marque is the legal act by which the applicant — the future owner — requests a monopoly over a sign or a sound for specified goods and services. The fundamental difference from US practice: France and the EU are first-to-file systems. No use in commerce, no intent-to-use declaration, no specimens — rights flow from registration, and the filing date is everything.
A filing consists of three components: a representation of the sign (a word, a logo, a color, a sound, and so on), a list of goods and services grouped by class under the Nice Classification, and the identity of the applicant. A priority claim can be added where the filing follows an earlier foreign application within the Paris Convention window. Nothing in the file needs to show the mark already in use — a sharp contrast with the specimen of use a USPTO examiner expects on a Section 1(a) application.
If the mark is filed in the name of a legal entity, the filing must be made by a person with authority to represent it. The simplest route is to instruct a trademark attorney, who needs no power of attorney to represent one or more applicants.
See trademark fees and costs for full cost breakdowns, including renewal and opposition fees.
Because no use is required to obtain a French or EU registration, an applicant can file defensively, for a product still in development, or simply to reserve a name before launch — something a US applicant relying on the intent-to-use track would recognize, minus the Statement of Use that the USPTO eventually requires. The trade-off comes later: once a French or EU mark is more than five years old, it becomes exposed to revocation for non-use if it has not actually been put to genuine use. Filing without a use requirement therefore buys time, not a permanent exemption from using the mark.
Once the mark registers, the ten-year term of protection runs from the filing date — renewal falls due ten years after filing, not registration (see trademark renewal). The filing date is also the date used for priority purposes when the filing is a first filing, opening the six-month Paris Convention window for foreign extensions. Conversely, when a French filing claims priority from an earlier foreign filing (typically a US application), the priority document must be translated into French and filed with the INPI within three months of the French filing date — a short administrative deadline that is easy to miss when the US filing was handled by different counsel.
Before filing, availability should be checked through a clearance search.
A US software company preparing to launch in France should file with the INPI, or with the EUIPO for EU-wide coverage, well before the local launch date. Because the filing date — not the go-live date — anchors both the ten-year term and any later priority claim, waiting until the product is market-ready can be costly: a competitor or a squatter filing first captures the earlier date, and the true first user of the mark in the US market may find itself opposing, or negotiating around, a French registration it does not own.
Filing is the starting point of French trademark registration and EU trademark registration, and it is the step that should always follow a trademark clearance search rather than precede it. Budgeting for a filing is covered in trademark fees and costs. See also: applicant, trademark registration.