Glossary
French: classe
A class is one of the 45 categories of the international Nice Classification into which the goods and services of a trademark filing must be sorted. Classes 1 through 34 cover goods; classes 35 through 45 cover services. The system is the same one used by the USPTO, so US counsel will find it familiar.
A single filing may designate one or several classes, up to all 45 — though a French filing in 45 classes would cost €190 + (40 × €44) = €1,950 in official fees alone, and such broad filings are rare in a system where unused registrations become vulnerable to revocation for non-use after five years.
As in US practice, classification is purely administrative: you cannot rely on class membership to determine whether goods or services are similar. Products in the same class may be entirely dissimilar — class 9, for example, contains fire extinguishers, microprocessors and eyeglasses, which share a class but not similarity.
The classification is still taken into account in one respect: goods and services that are not in the same class cannot, a priori, be identical — at most similar.
See also: goods and services, similarity of goods and services, trademark fees and costs.