Skip to content

WIPO Hague System (WO/WIPO/Hague)
Layer multilateral
Jurisdiction WO (international system)
Issuing body World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) — International Bureau
Rights administered industrial_design
Working languages English, French, Spanish (source)
Connector status skipped (no public search API; ToS + robots.txt prohibit automation)
Last verified 2026-05-16
Manifest entry not listed in coverage/sources.yaml

Detail surveys:

Sibling layers covering overlapping data:

  • multilateral/wipo-global-design-db.md — Global Design Database (Hague + ~30 national/regional collections aggregated)
  • Future national design connectors (EUIPO, IP Australia Designs, USPTO design patents, JPO, KIPO) — Hague designations land in the same national registers via the Hague filing workflow

Rating: 🔴 Red — ToS

Hague Express is just a collection=Hague filter on Global Design DB (same backend, same ToS, robots.txt disallow); Hague Web Services is partner-IP-office-only Jump to access details → View on the atlas →

§1 Mission

The Hague System is WIPO's centralized filing pathway for international industrial design registrations. Filed via a single international application under the 1960 and/or 1999 Acts of the Hague Agreement, an international registration ("IR") can designate 80 contracting parties covering 97 countries (as of late 2024; growing — Saudi Arabia acceded in 2025, with 82 members / 99 countries cited in the Hague Yearly Review 2025). Each designation is then examined according to the law of the designated contracting party. Agents care about Hague because it is the single point of truth for an IR's bibliographic data, designations, and per- country legal-status history before those events propagate (with lag) into national design registers.

§2 What's unique here

Hague-only data not reliably available from any higher layer:

  • The IR record itself — IR number, registration date under 1960 vs 1999 Acts, basic application identifiers — is canonical at WIPO and is the join key into per-country national-design files (see Hague Guide: International Registration).
  • All-designations-from-one-filing — Hague is the only place where every contracting-party designation of a single IR is visible together, before national propagation.
  • Legal-status changes from designated offices — refusals, protections, invalidations are notified to WIPO and surfaced in the Hague Express UI and the International Designs Bulletin (source).
  • The International Designs Bulletin — weekly Friday-noon-CET publication that is the legal-effect publication for Hague IRs (source).
  • Reduced fees for LDC applicants under the Hague Agreement — 10% of the standard amounts, only knowable from WIPO's schedule (source).

§3 Programmatic surfaces

Hague Express (public IR search UI)

Field Value
Endpoint https://designdb.wipo.int/designdb/hague/en/ — application entry; marketing page at /en/web/hague-system/design_search
Auth None for human use
Format HTML JSP UI; AJAX returns HTML view-state fragments — no documented JSON
Rate limit 10 search actions / minute / IP threshold (GDD ToS §2.1); 24-hour IP block on robot detection (GDD FAQ)
ToS posture Automated queries explicitly prohibited; robots.txt disallows /designdb/*? and /designdb/*/jsp paths (source)
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 red
Primary source Hague Express Help

Inherits the Global Design Database stack; no Hague-specific public API.

International Designs Bulletin (XML download)

Field Value
Endpoint https://www.wipo.int/en/web/hague-system/bulletin/notes (info), per-issue XML linked from browse-by-bulletin
Auth None to download
Format ST.96 v4.0 XML (standard)
Rate limit Not documented as a programmatic feed
ToS posture Intended for IP offices doing substantive review of IRs (source)
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 red — bulk per-issue, not query; using it for per-user queries requires a hosted index
Primary source Bulletin help

ST.96-modeled XML, structurally clean — but bulk-only, which violates our zero-infra rule.

Hague Web Services (HWS) — partner-only

Field Value
Endpoint Spec at https://www3.wipo.int/confluence/x/IACaTw (IP-office-only Confluence); overview PDF at confluence.wipo.int/.../Hague Web Services_e-2.pdf
Auth Asymmetric-key signature, FAPI 1.0; partner IP offices only
Format HTTPS REST/JSON; ST.96 payloads
Rate limit Not public
ToS posture Partner agreement; not available to third parties
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 red — not a search API; filing/exchange workflow only
Primary source WIPO API Catalog idAPI 158 (entry "Hague Web Services (HWS)")

The only Hague API in WIPO's catalog. Not for us.

eHague (filer workbench)

Field Value
Endpoint https://hague.wipo.int/
Auth WIPO account (filer-scoped)
Format Web UI
ToS posture Filer-only; scoped to own portfolio
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 red — no public search surface
Primary source eHague filing tutorial

Useful only for filers reading their own portfolio.

Fee Calculator + Fee Schedule

Field Value
Endpoint https://www.wipo.int/en/web/hague-system/fees/calculator (UI); /fees/sched (HTML table); /fees/individ-fee (individual designation fees)
Auth None
Format HTML only; client-side JS reads static fee tables
ToS posture Public information
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🟡 yellow — usable by scraping the HTML schedule for fee snapshots, but no JSON API
Primary source Fee schedule page

The fee schedule is HTML and stable — a tractable scrape target if we ever decide to surface Hague fees, but not a search surface.

§4 Fees

The Hague System charges in CHF only. Fee categories: basic fee per design, publication fees per reproduction / extra page, standard designation fees (three levels) or individual designation fees chosen by each Contracting Party.

Discount programs:

  • LDC applicant reduction — applicants whose sole entitlement is connection with a Least Developed Country pay a reduced fraction of standard fees.

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

Nothing for Hague. WIPO Lex (statute text) covers the Hague Agreement text itself but not Hague IRs. National connectors (IP Australia Designs, etc.) cover Hague-designated designs after national propagation.

What we should add (if anything)

Nothing for live search. The strategic memory:

  • No public Hague search API exists.
  • The Hague Express UI is ToS-blocked and robots.txt-blocked.
  • The Bulletin XML feed is bulk-per-issue and violates the zero-infra rule.
  • HWS is partner-only.

Mild yellow opportunity: Hague fee snapshot scrape of /fees/sched and /fees/individ-fee. The pages are stable HTML with structured tables (confirmed 2026-05-16 by curl + grep against the live pages). This would be a tiny static corpus refresher, not a live API. Low priority.

Next steps

  • Quarterly re-check of the WIPO API Catalog for a potential future public Hague search API.
  • Optionally schedule a small Hague fee-snapshot scrape (yellow, low-priority) if downstream users ask for "what does a Hague filing cost in country X."
  • Continue to direct Hague-related queries to WIPO's UI as a deep-link destination, not as a proxied surface.

§6 Known unknowns

  • Is there a private Hague search API for the WIPO IP Portal's authenticated users at https://ipportal.wipo.int/ beyond the eHague workbench? — No primary source found.
  • Will the WIPO API Catalog ever list a third-party-callable Hague search API? — No public roadmap. The WIPO API Day 2023 program mentioned API catalogue expansion in general but no Hague search commitment.
  • Could Hague IR data be reached through the EUIPO DesignView / federated design search? — Not yet investigated; tracked in the next wave.
  • Are the per-country individual designation fees scrape-friendly as a structured table? — Pages exist at /fees/individ-fee; not yet shape-validated.

§7 References

Last updated 2026-05-16.