One mark, twenty-seven counters

On the first of April 1996, in a new office building in Alicante chosen partly because the weather was kind and partly because Madrid asked for it, the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market began taking applications for something Europe had never had: a single trade mark good in every member state. The filing counters received tens of thousands of applications in the opening season, from firms that had spent two years preparing for a door that finally opened. The bench opens its first volume on that morning, because the Community Trade Mark was the largest shared sign a market had ever kept, and its machinery still runs under a newer name.

What one filing bought

Before 1996 a company wanting cover across Europe filed country by country: a dozen registers, a dozen languages, a dozen renewal calendars. The Community Trade Mark collapsed that into one application, one language of procedure chosen from a small official list, one fee, one registration and one right of action good in every member state. A mark refused or lost anywhere in the Union was lost everywhere, which was the price of the bargain: unity of the sign meant unity of its fate, and a single bad word in one member state could sink the whole filing. In 2016 the instrument was renamed the European Union trade mark and the office became EUIPO, but the deed reads the same.

The queue at the doors

The rush was real and it was about dates. A filing date is a place in line, and the first weeks of April 1996 put every applicant in the same line at once. Firms couriered applications by the box; the office received filings by the tens of thousands in its opening season, more than many national registers see in a decade. Because applications filed on the same day shared the same date, examiners treated the early flood as a single cohort. The bench likes the detail because it shows what the instrument really was: not a convenience but a starting gate, and the whole of European industry heard the pistol at once.

Alicante by design

The seat was a political settlement dressed as a practical one. Spain argued that the new office should decentralise the Union's institutions away from the Brussels-Luxembourg axis, and Alicante, a mid-sized Mediterranean city with an airport and a beach, won. The choice turned out to matter beyond symbolism: an office planted outside the capitals kept its own tempo, built its own examiner corps, recruited its own litigation culture, and became the kind of institution whose public bulletin a journal like this one can read like a tide table. Trade mark people still say going to Alicante the way baseball people say Cooperstown, half joke and half pilgrimage, and the office's own study visits keep the habit alive.

The register as a public text

What made the CTM more than a cheaper filing was its publicity. Every application was published in the official bulletin, open to opposition for three months; every registration entered a searchable public register; every assignment and licence could be recorded against it. The mark existed as a public fact before it existed as a private asset. That is the register's first principle, and the CTM embodied it at continental scale: a sign is a piece of public writing that a community agrees to honour, and the honour is recorded where anyone can read it. Twenty-seven languages of commerce now read the same line in the same book. It is worth pausing on how strange that is: a word entered once in Alicante obliges a bailiff in Lisbon and a judge in Tallinn to see the same sign, and the register's pages are the place where that obligation is written for anyone to check.

What could not be a mark

The regulation drew the line where shared language begins. Signs that are only descriptive, the shape dictated by the goods themselves, the words every trader needs, could not be fenced off as one company's mark, because a register that lets a firm own the word for the thing itself would tax everyone else's speech. Distinctiveness had to be shown or earned. The same logic governs collective and certification marks and the appellations in the table volume: a shared sign may be registered, but it may not confiscate the common tongue. The register exists to assign names, not to privatise the dictionary, and every refusal on descriptiveness grounds is a small deed of guardianship over the shared word hoard.

The first morning's lesson

Thirty years on, the CTM's founding morning still organises the subject. It proved that a mark could be held against twenty-seven jurisdictions at once, that the record of that holding could be public and cheap to search, and that a community could underwrite a sign the way it underwrites a currency. Every entry in this volume descends from that proof. The bench does not romanticise the office; it simply notes that on a spring morning in 1996, Europe agreed to keep one book of marks, and the book has been kept ever since, through the rename, through enlargement, through the departure of the member whose law had drafted half its habits.

The morning's other lesson is quieter: a register this size only works because it was designed to be read by strangers. The counters closed decades ago; the book stayed open, and that is the whole entry.