Glossary
French: annulation de marque
Annulation de marque is the umbrella term for actions that strip a registered French trademark of its effects — roughly what a US attorney would pursue through a TTAB cancellation proceeding or a court action for cancellation. A key difference from US practice: many of these actions can be brought administratively before the INPI (the French trademark office) as well as before the Tribunal judiciaire (the French civil court).
Before the INPI, a mark can be attacked through:
An invalidity action can always be brought before the Tribunal judiciaire, either as a principal claim under certain conditions or as a counterclaim in infringement litigation.
French practice, like EU practice, actually separates two families of action that “cancellation” loosely covers in everyday English. Revocation (déchéance) strips a mark of its effects for the future only, from the date the ground arose (typically non-use, deceptiveness or genericide) — the mark’s history up to that point stands. Invalidity (nullité), by contrast, treats the mark as if it had never validly existed, generally wiping out its effects retroactively from filing — the appropriate remedy for absolute grounds defects or a conflict with genuinely prior rights. Getting the label right matters for damages exposure and for license agreements or settlements built on the mark in the interim.
Since the INPI’s administrative cancellation procedure opened up (part of the same reform package that harmonized French practice with the rest of the EU), the administrative and judicial routes coexist along a rough jurisdictional split: revocation and invalidity based on absolute grounds or straightforward prior-rights conflicts generally belong before the INPI, while more factually complex invalidity claims — or any claim raised as a counterclaim in ongoing infringement litigation — stay with the Tribunal judiciaire. For a US client, the administrative route is usually faster and cheaper than court litigation.
The Lanham Act splits cancellation into similar conceptual buckets — genericide, abandonment (the rough equivalent of non-use), fraud in procurement, and priority-based cancellation — decided by the TTAB or, in infringement litigation, by a federal court. The structural difference for US counsel to internalize is the dual-track nature of the French system: the same substantive ground can sometimes be pursued either before the INPI or before the Tribunal judiciaire depending on the procedural posture, whereas a TTAB cancellation and a federal-court invalidity defense are more clearly separated by forum and by the relief each can grant (the TTAB cannot award damages; a federal court can).
A US company discovers that a French competitor has registered, and never used, a mark blocking its planned French expansion. Because the registration is now more than five years old and unused, the US company can file a straightforward non-use revocation request directly with the INPI — a comparatively fast administrative process — rather than commencing full court litigation, unless another complicating claim pulls the matter into the Tribunal judiciaire instead.
A cancelled mark is deprived of effect: it can no longer support oppositions, damages claims or injunctions.
Cancellation is the tool of choice when a blocking prior mark stands in the way of a French filing or an EU filing and cannot be cleared through negotiation — see amicable settlement of trademark disputes for the alternative route. See also trademark revocation, revocation for non-use and INPI.