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INPI France (FR) — national
Layer national
Jurisdiction FR (WIPO ST.3: FR)
Issuing body Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle (INPI)
Rights administered patent, utility certificate (certificat d'utilité), trademark, design, geographical indication (industrial/artisanal IGs)
Working languages French (primary); English (thin — some service pages and high-level access docs)
Connector status statutes shipped (FR/Legifrance/IP); register APIs yellow — defer hosted proxy, queue BYOK
Last verified 2026-05-16
Manifest entry coverage/sources.yaml FR/Legifrance/IP (statutes via patent_client_agents.legifrance — Code de la propriété intellectuelle + Code de commerce L.151 trade secrets)

Detail surveys:

Higher layers covering this office transitively:

  • EPO INPADOC (via regional/epo.md) — FR patent biblio + family + legal events (national-route filings and EP designations of FR). This is the recommended substitute for INPI patent register data.
  • EUIPO (via planned regional/euipo.md) — only for EU-level marks (EUTMs designating FR) and Community designs (RCDs). FR-national-only TMs and designs are NOT covered.
  • WIPO Madrid / Hague — Madrid IRs designating FR / Hague IRs designating FR; national-only filings remain INPI-exclusive.

Rating: 🟡 Yellow — BYOK

api-gateway.inpi.fr is the cleanest national REST surface surveyed (JSON, SolR Lucene, ST.36/66/86); session-bearer + XSRF auth bound to personal data.inpi.fr account (NOT PISTE — older survey was wrong); 10 req/min throttle Jump to access details → View on the atlas →

§1 Mission

INPI is the French national IP office — the only authoritative registrar for FR national patents (including utility certificates, certificats d'utilité), FR national trademarks, FR national designs, and industrial/ artisanal geographical indications. It also operates the Registre national des entreprises (RNE) (out of scope for IP).

Because France is an EPC contracting state and an EU member, most "French patents" are EP-routed (covered by EPO OPS) and most "French trademarks" are EUTMs (covered by EUIPO). INPI's genuine value-add for agents is the French-national-only slice — ~190k active FR national TMs, FR national designs, certificats d'utilité, and FR-language full-text fields.

INPI is separate from Légifrance, which publishes French primary law (including the Code de la propriété intellectuelle and Code de commerce L.151 trade-secret provisions). Légifrance is operated by DILA (Direction de l'information légale et administrative) under the Prime Minister, fronted by the PISTE OAuth2 gateway — that's the only PISTE-fronted French IP-relevant API. The INPI Data PI APIs are on a separate authentication stack at api-gateway.inpi.fr — they are NOT on PISTE.

§2 What's unique here

  • FR national trademarks — ~190k active national TMs not registered as EUTMs and not visible in EUIPO eSearch. (INPI marks search base)
  • FR national designs — filed directly with INPI, not via Hague IR or RCD; INPI publishes WIPO ST.86 v1.0 XML — same standard as EUIPO RCD bulk.
  • Certificats d'utilité (utility certificate) — distinct FR right (6-year term, no examination report), low volume (<1000/yr), partially in INPADOC but not always at full fidelity.
  • Pre-1978 FR patent backfile (1902-1977) — published FR applications before EPO INPADOC's coverage window starts. Niche but real for prior-art searches in older art.
  • INPI Director-General decisions — TM oppositions (2004+), nullity/ revocation (2020+), patent oppositions (2020+); previously on pibd.inpi.fr, now migrating to data.inpi.fr (frozen 2026-03-11).
  • Industrial/artisanal geographical indications — distinct from agri/wine GIs (which go via INAO/eAmbrosia); INPI manages industrial IGs since 2014.

§3 Programmatic surfaces

INPI Data PI APIs (api-gateway.inpi.fr)

Field Value
Endpoint https://api-gateway.inpi.fr/services/apidiffusion/api/{brevets,marques,dessins}/search
Auth INPI Data account (free, email signup) → XSRF-TOKEN cookie → POST /login for access token + refresh token. Not OAuth2 client_credentials.
Format JSON (search envelope) + XML (notice; ST.36 / ST.66 / ST.86 v1.0) + PDF (images)
Rate limit 10,000 requests/day per account; 10 GB/day; 10 req/min throughput; 10,000-result per-query cap; offset ≤ 500
ToS posture Reuse licence permits redistribution; CGU "no obstruction of third-party access" clause is the friction point for hosted proxies
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🟡 Yellow — clean technical surface; quota math + CGU push this to BYOK
Primary sources Accès aux API PI · Swagger PI · Tech doc PDF

This is the cleanest national-IP REST surface we've seen — SolR Lucene query syntax, INID-coded field selection, JSON pagination — but the 10 req/ min throughput on a single technical account makes a hosted shared-key proxy impractical for interactive agent UX.

Légifrance API (via PISTE OAuth2)

Field Value
Endpoint https://api.piste.gouv.fr/dila/legifrance/...
Auth PISTE OAuth2 client_credentials — registration at piste.gouv.fr/registration, free, open to non-French developers
Format JSON
Rate limit Per-app PISTE limits (not publicly pinned; sandbox + prod separation)
ToS posture Open Licence 2.0 — permissive for redistribution
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🟢 Green — already shipped as FR/Legifrance/IP
Primary source Open data et API - Légifrance

data.inpi.fr web UI

Field Value
Endpoint https://data.inpi.fr/
Auth none (search); account required for downloads
Format HTML
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 Red — HTML scrape; the JSON API above is the supported path

INPI FTP/SFTP bulk

Field Value
Endpoint Per-account SFTP credentials issued via data.inpi.fr
Format Weekly/bi-weekly ZIPs of XML + images; annual stock
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 Red — bulk violates the zero-infra constraint

PIBD jurisprudence (legacy, frozen)

Field Value
Endpoint https://pibd.inpi.fr/
Status Frozen 2026-03-11; migrating to data.inpi.fr with no published API yet
Verdict 🔴 Red — moving target; route FR IP case law to Judilibre instead

API Entreprise INPI (PISTE / entreprise.api.gouv.fr)

Field Value
Endpoint https://entreprise.api.gouv.fr/v3/inpi/...
Auth Gov-to-gov channel — restricted to French public-sector users (prefectures, tax authorities, etc.)
Verdict (zero-infra proxy) 🔴 Red — not open to private SaaS proxies
Primary source api.gouv.fr/producteurs/inpi

§4 Fees

Status (2026-05-19): Three routes shipped on the bundled patent_client_agents.fees connector — FR/INPI/Fees/Patent, FR/INPI/Fees/Trademark, and FR/INPI/Fees/Design. INPI publishes a consolidated French-language tariff covering patents (filing, search report, grant, annuities yrs 2-20), trade marks (filing / renewal per class on a 10-year cycle), and designs (filing, prorogation per 5-year period).

Discount programs (eligibility):

  • Tarif réduit (typically 50%): natural persons (personnes physiques), non-profit research/education organisations, companies with <1000 employees AND <25% capital held by a non-qualifying entity. The scraper maps the PDF's "TARIFS RÉDUITS" column to EntityTier.small.

v1 GAPS (documented in the scraper's notes field):

  • Annuity reduced rates are reliably captured by pypdf for years 2-7 only; years 8-20 reduced rates exist in the source PDF but the second column drops out of text extraction for those rows.
  • REGISTRES NATIONAUX admin fees, INDICATIONS GÉOGRAPHIQUES, and DROITS VOISINS (semiconductor topographies) are out of v1 scope.
  • The Madrid international PDF (id=20520) is in CHF and overlaps with the WIPO Madrid international scraper; not loaded here.

§5 Access via patent-client-agents

What we cover today

  • patent_client_agents.legifrance — PISTE OAuth2 client over Légifrance for Code de la propriété intellectuelle (LEGITEXT000006069414, covering copyright L.111-1+, patents L.611-1+, TMs L.711-1+, designs L.511-1+, GIs L.722-1+) and Code de commerce L.151-1 à L.154-1 (trade secrets). Manifest entry FR/Legifrance/IP.
  • FR patent biblio + family via patent_client_agents.epo_ops (transitive, country code FR).

What we should add

Queue (do not build now):

  • inpi_pi — BYOK FR national TMs + designs. Per-user credential model (each user signs up at data.inpi.fr, supplies their session credentials via env / config). Targets the two genuine coverage gaps — FR-only TMs (~190k active) and FR-only designs. Skip patents (EPO OPS covers them). Cross-reference: queue in BACKLOG.md once the BYOK pattern is settled (JPO and DPMA per-user paths inform shape).
  • judilibre — FR IP case law via PISTE OAuth (same client as Légifrance). Covers Tribunal judiciaire de Paris 3e chambre, Cour d'appel de Paris pôle 5, and Cour de cassation. Highest-leverage FR IP module per the 2026-05 connector survey. Separate PR — does not depend on INPI PI resolution.
  • inpi_directives — three INPI PDF manuals (patents, TM opposition, designs registration) into the StaticLawCorpus base. Half-day work each.

Next steps

  1. Design the BYOK pattern uniformly across JPO, DPMA, and now INPI — single env-var convention for user-supplied IP-office credentials.
  2. Build judilibre on top of the existing PISTE OAuth client used for Légifrance. One-PR scope.
  3. Watch the PIBD migration target for a documented case-law API surface — if INPI ships one with JSON responses, prefer it over a Judilibre-only path for INPI Director- General decisions.
  4. Queue dedicated fee research for fr-inpi (split between patent, TM, design, plus the EUR-denominated reductions tier).

§6 Known unknowns

  • PISTE registration accessibility for non-French developers. piste.gouv.fr/registration accepts name + email only on its face — no SIREN required for Légifrance/Judilibre apps. Confirm empirically when registering the Judilibre app.
  • INPI Data account accessibility for non-French registrants. No primary source states a French-residency requirement, but the entire signup flow is French-only. Confirm empirically.
  • PIBD migration target schema. When does the data.inpi.fr replacement for PIBD ship? Will it expose JSON/API or HTML only? No primary source found beyond the 2026-03-11 freeze notice.
  • Judilibre Tribunal judiciaire de Paris 3e chambre coverage depth. "Lower courts civil since 2024-12-31" per the Cour de cassation open-data page — is the IP trial chamber retrospectively indexed, or forward-looking only?
  • Certificats d'utilité coverage in EPO OPS / INPADOC. Empirical test needed to confirm whether the INPI BYOK path is the only way to get full-fidelity utility-certificate data.
  • INPI PI quota semantics. Are the 10,000/day and 10 GB/day caps per-account or per-key? Does SFTP bulk share the same quota? No primary source pins this precisely.
  • INPI reuse licence vs. Etalab 2.0 verbatim differences. Primary source confirms it is "approved Etalab variant" but the redistribution-via-proxy permission needs a careful read against the INPI reuse licence text.

§7 References

Primary sources only — inpi.fr, data.inpi.fr, piste.gouv.fr, legifrance.gouv.fr, courdecassation.fr, gouv.fr, WIPO.

Service overviews (INPI PI):

Technical specs:

Legal terms:

Fees:

Statutes (already shipped via FR/Legifrance/IP):

PISTE / Judilibre (separate workstream):

Case law (PIBD migration in progress):

Detail survey + wave:

Last updated 2026-05-16.