Glossary
French: produits et services
The goods and services and the sign are the two main components of a trademark. The goods-and-services list defines the scope of the monopoly claimed — the trademark counterpart of a patent’s claims, and the anchor of the principle of specialty: a trademark right protects a sign only for the goods and services it designates, not against all uses of that sign everywhere.
Goods and services are sorted into the 45 classes of the Nice Classification (goods: classes 1–34; services: 35–45). Classification is purely administrative: a single class can contain very different items (class 9 holds microprocessors, fire extinguishers and eyeglasses), and no legal conclusion about similarity can be drawn from class membership — though items in different classes cannot a priori be identical. In practice, examiners and courts assess similarity by function, nature, end user, distribution channel and complementarity, never by class number alone.
The goods and services must be precise enough for any third party to easily determine their scope. If they are too vague, or filed in the wrong class, the INPI issues an irregularity notice (comparable to a USPTO office action on the identification): the applicant must clarify or delete vague items, or reclassify — paying the extra class fee (€40 per additional class in France, €50 for a second class and €150 per further class at the EUIPO) where reclassification adds a class. Precise drafting from the start avoids these costs. Class headings and pre-approved wording accepted by the INPI or EUIPO’s own harmonized database are the safest route to a fast, irregularity-free filing.
The list can never be broadened during the life of a mark; it can only be reduced, through the limitation procedure. Limitation is a settlement tool: narrowing the list can enable coexistence agreements and defuse oppositions or protests. This asymmetry has real strategic weight: an applicant should file the broadest defensible list at the outset, because anything left out cannot be added later without a fresh filing (and a fresh filing date, which matters for priority and for surviving a revocation for non-use challenge on the earlier registration).
The USPTO’s identification-of-goods-and-services practice is the direct US counterpart, and it is considerably stricter on precision than European practice tends to be. The USPTO maintains its own controlled list of acceptable identifications and will reject vague or overly broad wording outright; French and EU filers, by contrast, have historically had more latitude with broad class-heading language, though EUIPO practice has moved toward reading class headings literally — covering only what the wording actually says — rather than as shorthand for the entire class. A further divergence a US in-house team should keep in mind: US filings require a bona fide intent to use (or actual use) for every item listed, while INPI and EUIPO filings carry no such requirement at filing — a gap that only becomes relevant later, once the mark is old enough to face a non-use challenge.
A US company files for “computer software” in class 9 without further detail. An INPI or EUIPO examiner may accept this as sufficiently precise for straightforward software, but a broader, catch-all drafting style used successfully before the USPTO can trigger an irregularity notice in Europe if it reads as covering unrelated sub-fields — the fix is usually to narrow the wording to the actual field of use (e.g., “downloadable mobile software for [specific function]”) rather than leave it generic.
Drafting the goods-and-services list is the first substantive decision in any trademark filing — for both French trademark registration and EU trademark registration — and it resurfaces at every later stage where scope is contested: a trademark clearance search is run against a proposed list, an opposition turns on comparing two lists for similarity, and a settlement often narrows the list rather than abandon the mark outright. See also: trademark class and trademark fees and costs.