Glossary
French: signe
In trademark law, the sign is the element deposited as a mark: the brand name, logo, color or figurative element. Traditionally, a trademark is described as consisting of a sign plus a list of goods and services. US practice would simply say “the mark”; French usage isolates the sign as a distinct component.
A mark can be filed as a word mark, a figurative mark (design/logo), a semi-figurative mark (word plus design — what US practice calls a composite mark), or a motion mark. Since the reform of the Intellectual Property Code transposing the EU Trademark Directive, a mark can even consist of an MP3 file — a sound rather than a visual sign; sound marks are by extension treated within the law of distinctive signs. The sign can be filed in color or in black and white. For a motion mark example, see EUTM No. 019016401 on the EUIPO register. Smell marks cannot currently be registered — a point where EU practice is more restrictive than the USPTO, which has accepted scent marks in rare cases.
That same reform quietly changed what “the sign” means as a filing object: a sign used to have to be capable of graphic representation — a written description, a musical score, a drawing — before it could even be examined. That requirement is gone. A sign now only needs to be represented in a manner that is clear, precise and objective, which is why an MP3 file or a short video clip can be filed as-is, without translating it into a static graphic first. For US counsel, this maps loosely onto the shift the USPTO went through when it started accepting digital audio and video specimens rather than insisting on a written description of a sound mark.
The sign is what gets compared in an opposition: the comparison proceeds on the phonetic, conceptual and visual levels (see similarity of signs).
Not every sign is registrable: a valid mark must be distinctive. The sign BOULANGER (“baker”), for instance, cannot be monopolized as a word-only mark for bread-making — it is devoid of distinctiveness for that activity.
US practice does not isolate “the sign” as a separate legal category the way French and EU law do. A US attorney simply talks about “the mark,” and the Lanham Act’s own definition already folds in words, names, symbols, devices, sounds, colors and, in rare cases, scent. Splitting the sign out from the goods and services it covers is mostly a matter of analytical habit in French and EU practice rather than a substantive difference — but the habit has real consequences. French and EU examiners and tribunals treat “the sign” and “the specification of goods and services” as two entirely separate steps of the analysis, each with its own tests, and a filing can fail — or an opposition can succeed — on the sign step alone, independent of what the goods and services look like. A US in-house team briefing outside counsel in France or before the EUIPO should expect this two-step structure rather than the more unified “likelihood of confusion” inquiry it is used to at home.
Take a US software company that has always used a single stylized wordmark — the company name set in a distinctive typeface and color — as its US mark. Filed in France or before the EUIPO, that same visual is a semi-figurative sign: word and design treated together, but also separable for comparison purposes. An opponent could attack the application on the word alone, on the design alone, or on the combination, with a different similarity outcome possible at each level — a degree of granularity that US likelihood-of-confusion practice tends to compress into a single “overall commercial impression.”
The choice of sign is the first decision in the life of a mark: it is made when choosing a trademark, and it then drives how the mark is screened in a trademark clearance search and how it is described in a French or EU filing. See also distinctive sign, trademark and trademark filing.