EU, regional and international registers

A trademark can be in force in a country without ever appearing in that country’s national register. Demarka handles this for you, but it is worth understanding.

Registers are wider than countries

Ask for Germany and Demarka searches, automatically:

• the German national register
• the EU trademark register (EUIPO), because an EU trademark covers Germany
• the WIPO Madrid system, because an international registration can designate Germany

The same happens elsewhere. Benelux countries also pull in the Benelux office; African member states pull in OAPI or ARIPO as appropriate.

Historic registers are searched too — the former Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the Netherlands Antilles — mapped onto their successor states, because marks from them are still cited in practice.

You never have to add any of this yourself. It is why a German search returns EU trademarks you did not explicitly ask for.

Why you cannot type EM or WO as a territory

Registry codes such as EM (EUIPO), WO (WIPO), BX (Benelux), OA (OAPI) and AP (ARIPO) are sources, not places to protect a brand. They are added to every relevant search automatically.

Entering one as a territory returns an error rather than being silently accepted, because “assess my mark in WO” has no meaning — there is no WIPO trademark right, only international registrations designating individual countries.

For an EU-wide result, use the European Union option instead.

The EU: one right or twenty-seven

For search and monitoring it makes no difference — the same registers are queried either way.

For assessments it changes both the output and the price:

Choice	Reports	Credits	Answers
European Union	1	1	Can I register an EU trademark covering all 27 member states?
Each member state	27	27	How would each national office treat a national filing?

Pick the single EU assessment if you intend to file an EUTM at the EUIPO — the common case for EU-wide protection. Pick per-member-state assessments only for national filings, or when you specifically need to know which individual countries are the problem.

An EU trademark is unitary: an obstacle in one member state can defeat the whole application. That is why the single EU report exists as its own analysis rather than a summary of 27.

Monitoring and region bundles

Monitoring counts capacity in regions. The European Union is available as a region bundle: watching all 27 member states through it costs one monitoring slot, where selecting the same 27 countries individually would cost 27.

See Monitoring slots and credit funding.

Madrid designations

An international registration through the Madrid system is not a single global right. It is a bundle of national designations, each examined by its own office and each capable of being refused locally.

Demarka indexes those designations against the countries they cover, so a Madrid mark designating Spain surfaces in a Spanish search — and can be cited against you there.