A system that watches one door and not the other twenty-seven
EUIPO's monitoring does what it claims to do. Once a trademark is registered, the office tracks subsequent EU-level filings and flags the ones that look similar enough to matter. It is a legitimate, functioning layer of protection, and no firm should stop recommending it.
It is, however, worth pointing out where that protection stops. EUIPO's monitoring reaches EU-level filings and nothing beneath them. It does not touch the 27 national trademark registers operating underneath the EU system, each with its own filings, its own examiners, and no obligation to inform the EUIPO, let alone the rights holder, of what's coming through.
A business can hold an EU-registered trademark and still have a near-identical mark quietly filed in a single member state, with EUIPO's system remaining completely unaware of it. Without anybody watching that specific national register on an ongoing basis, any identical filing can proceed to registration without objections.
From client cases to our own trademark
We've watched this play out for clients more than once. An EU registration in good standing, no notifications, no red flags, and then a similar mark surfaces in a national register nobody happened to be watching, usually further along than anyone would like by the time it's found.
Then it happened to us. An application for TRAMAGROUP turned up in Italy's national trademark register, close enough to our own mark that it demanded an immediate response. Anyone can find the filing directly, through , Italy's own industrial property office. EUIPO said nothing about it, because EUIPO had no reason to look at Italy's register in the first place. We found it ourselves, because watching national registers is simply part of how we operate.
Once we had it, we moved quickly: a cease and desist letter, followed by direct negotiation with the applicant. The outcome landed the way these things rarely do without a fight. The counterparty is withdrawing the application and rebranding, no opposition proceeding required.
The conversation worth having before the filing, not after
None of this is an argument against an EU-wide registration. It remains the correct first move, and it should stay that way. What it argues against is stopping there, and assuming EUIPO's notifications mean the job of ongoing monitoring is settled.
Firms already running national-level monitoring alongside EU filings are ahead of this problem. Firms that aren't have a choice: raise it with clients now, or let a client discover the gap the way we did, except without the same window to act before it becomes a much harder problem to fix.
Protecting a filing isn't a one-time task, it's ongoing, and the earlier a conflicting national filing is caught, the easier it is to resolve. That's why we built continuous, national-level monitoring into how we work, running across the registers that matter, so a firm can honestly tell clients someone is watching every register that could produce a threat, not just the one EUIPO covers.
Discover how Trama can enhance your trademark practice with reliable monitoring and a global IP infrastructure built to support it, delivering the quality of protection worth putting your firm's name behind.
