Glossary
French: BOPI — Bulletin Officiel de la Propriété Industrielle
The BOPI is the Bulletin Officiel de la Propriété Industrielle — France’s official industrial property gazette, the counterpart of the USPTO’s Official Gazette. It is published every Friday by the INPI.
The BOPI has two parts:
When it was still issued on paper, each BOPI contained a black-and-white section followed by a color section. Trademark applications are published with the sign always presented in an 8 cm × 8 cm square — a limitation that digitization has not removed.
For now, only the BOPI has official legal value. The INPI’s online trademark database has no legal effect. When evidence of a French filing or registration is needed (for example in litigation or opposition proceedings), it is therefore recommended to rely on the BOPI itself rather than a simple database extract. The BOPI is available as a PDF, and each trademark record in the INPI’s database includes a download link to the relevant BOPI pages.
US practitioners can think of the distinction as similar to that between the Official Gazette and TESS: convenient search tools are not official publications.
See also: French trademark, registration certificate, trademark opposition.