Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property

The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, signed in Paris, France, on 20 March 1883, was one of the first intellectual property treaties. It established a Union for the protection of industrial property. The Convention is currently still in force. The substantive provisions of the Convention fall into three main categories: national treatment, priority right and common rules.

According to Articles 2 and 3 of this treaty, juristic and natural persons who are either national of or domiciled in a state party to the Convention shall, as regards the protection of industrial property, enjoy in all the other countries of the Union, the advantages that their respective laws grant to nationals.

In other words, when an applicant files an application for a patent or a trademark in a foreign country member of the Union, the application receives the same treatment as if it came from a national of this foreign country. Furthermore, if the intellectual property right is granted (e.g. if the applicant becomes owners of a patent or of a registered trademark), the owner benefits from the same protection and the same legal remedy against any infringement as if the owner was a national owner of this right.

The "Convention priority right", also called "Paris Convention priority right" or "Union priority right", was also established by Article 4 of the Paris Convention, and is regarded as one of the cornerstones of the Paris Convention. It provides that an applicant from one contracting State shall be able to use its first filing date (in one of the contracting State) as the effective filing date in another contracting State, provided that the applicant, or his successor in title, files a subsequent application within 6 months (for industrial designs and trademarks) or 12 months (for patents and utility models) from the first filing.

Article 11(1) of the Paris Convention requires that the Countries of the Union "grant temporary protection to patentable inventions, utility models, industrial designs, and trademarks, in respect of goods exhibited at official or officially recognized international exhibitions held in the territory of any of them".

If a patent or trademark registration is applied for during the temporary period of protection, the priority date of the application may be counted "from the date of introduction of the goods into the exhibition" rather than from the date of filing of the application, if the temporary protection referred to in Article 11(1) has been implemented in such a manner in national law. There are, however, other means for the Countries of the Union to implement in their national law the temporary protection provided for in Article 11 of the Paris Convention:

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