The Patent and Trademark National Office (the “INPI”) is a public establishment in charge of delivering patents, marks and patterns. In that regard, the INPI helps the applicant for all the steps required. The INPI welcomes and informs any inventor, whether there are individual or commercial entity. Creation’s protection can be done by different services and programs such as pre-diagnosis, awareness campaign, or different individual services. The INPI is a major actor regarding the industrial and intellectual creation’s protection. The INPI favors the access to different rights that permit to each inventor to protect and use the invention against any counterfeit.
Beyond delivering different national industrial property titles, the INPI sensitizes, forms and provides any information regarding industrial property. The INPI lays out material on judicial and technical matters, complete and specific, available for consultation, through a database. As an example, the INPI facilitates public access to different data such as industrial property titles application, gives more specific information to professionals including the most recent judicial judgments applying in that matter. In addition, the INPI holds the commercial and companies register. In that regards, it centralized all the information about the French companies. As a consequence, the INPI is able to deliver any information about the companies’ economic development.
Eager for developing industrial property in the international sphere as well as in the local sphere, the INPI offers different action programs in order to form and sensitize the public and professionals in that matter.
The INPI fights actively against any kind of counterfeit. It also participates to the establishment of public policy in that field, being a strength proposal to the government and suggests the improvement of the applicable rules in that matter. This parallel activity is actually growing and threats the consumers either on a security ground as on the health sphere, as well as the companies. As a consequence, the INPI gets strongly involved in that matter in order to support all of the taken engagement in particularly via the counterfeiting national Comity, whose general Secretary is governed by the INPI. This Comity deals with the reinforcement of the legal rules governing the counterfeiting by coordinating administration and private’s actions.
The INPI is not simply a local actor. Indeed, it goes beyond national borders, acting on the international sphere as it enhances standard rules, adapt them and draw rules up. All of that is done in collaboration with different States. Moreover, this institute acts beside different european and international authorities, representing France worldwide and reinforcing its influence. Indeed, France is represented by the INPI before different organizations such as the EPO (European Patent Office), the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), and the OHIM (the trade, marks and designs registration office of the European Union).
Jean-Charles BENSUSSAN is registered as an expert in I.P. prediagnosis for the INPI.