French applicants often have the reflex to file a French trademark, on the one hand because their activity is most of the time limited to French territory, at least at the beginning, and on the other hand because they are not familiar with the mechanisms for filing a trademark abroad.<\/p>\n
However, with the development of the Internet, borders tend to disappear in favour of a global world territory that is limited only by the exportability or non-exportability of the products or services on offer.<\/p>\n
When considering trademark protection abroad, the European Union trademark (formerly known as a Community Trademark) is an interesting option: it covers the 28 countries of the European Union for a relatively low cost (900\u20ac for 1 to 3 classes), barely 4 times (and some dust) the price of a French trademark. Moreover, an EU brand covers a market of no less than 500 million potential consumers !<\/p>\n
This is a single security, filed with theEUIPO<\/a> (European Union Intellectual Property Office, formerly OHIM), which protects your trademark in 28 countries without having to go through an examination phase in each of them. The EUIPO centralizes the applications, studies them and then issues the registration. The procedure is also fast, and if all goes well, your trademark will be registered in less than 6 months.<\/p>\n There is, however, a downside to this beautiful medal: as it is a unitary title, your trademark will be protected in all 28 countries, if not nothing. If a Polish national, for example, attacks your EU trademark and succeeds, the trademark will be refused or cancelled in all the countries of the Union, without being able to maintain it in those where the said Polish national has no opposable right.<\/p>\n In this case, it is still possible to request the conversion of the EU trademark into as many national trademarks as there are countries of interest to you, but you will have to pay a conversion fee AND a national filing fee in each country. Subsequently, each national office will examine your trademark at its own pace, according to its own criteria, and will issue its own registration certificate.<\/p>\n The EU trademark is therefore a fragile trademark: the risks of attack by third parties holding prior rights are multiplied by 28. Moreover, it is difficult, time-consuming and expensive to carry out in-depth prior rights searches for each country. This results in a very limited knowledge of the risks incurred by its filing. This is why the opposition rate is relatively high: approximately 1 in 5 EU trademarks is opposed.<\/p>\n The EU brand must not be ignored for these reasons, far from it. The scope of its protection is worth trying to register! However, to ensure a reliable legal basis for your trademark, we advise you, if your budget allows, to start with a French trademark (whose availability you will have ensured by means of extensive background checks<\/a>) and then to file an EU trademark within the priority period. This will allow you to secure your rights in France (when France is a key territory for you) while betting on international protection.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Les d\u00e9posants fran\u00e7ais ont souvent le r\u00e9flexe de d\u00e9poser une marque fran\u00e7aise, d\u2019une part parce que leur activit\u00e9 est la plupart du temps limit\u00e9e au territoire fran\u00e7ais, du moins au d\u00e9but, et d\u2019autre part parce qu\u2019ils ne connaissent pas bien les m\u00e9canismes de d\u00e9p\u00f4t de marque \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9tranger. Or, avec le d\u00e9veloppement d\u2019internet, les fronti\u00e8res […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiches-pratiques","post-wrapper","thrv_wrapper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1548\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/depot-de-marque.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}