How to check an EU trademark before you name your startup

To check an EU trademark before you name your startup, search two free tools: eSearch plus, the official database of the EUIPO (the European Union Intellectual Property Office, which administers EU trademarks), and TMview, a multilingual search that aggregates records from dozens of participating trademark offices — national EU registers and offices well beyond Europe included. The reason this check matters so much in the EU specifically is the shape of the right you’re checking against: a European Union Trade Mark (EUTM) is a single registration that covers all 27 member states at once — one filing, one fee, one register. That’s efficient for the owner, and it means one registration you’ve never heard of can be relevant in every EU country you might ever sell in.

This is general information, not legal advice. Trademark law is full of judgment calls — similarity, classes, priority — that depend on your exact situation and jurisdiction. Before you commit real money to a name, talk to a trademark attorney. A one-hour consultation is dramatically cheaper than a rebrand.

What is an EUTM, and how is it different from a national trademark?

Two trademark systems coexist in the EU, and a proper check has to account for both.

A national trademark is filed with a single country’s intellectual property office and protects the name only in that country. A European Union Trade Mark is filed once, centrally, with the EUIPO and grants unitary protection across the entire EU — every member state, automatically, with one renewal to maintain. For a business that genuinely wants EU-wide coverage, one EUTM is usually far cheaper and simpler than filing separately in dozens of countries.

Crucially, an EUTM doesn’t replace national marks — the two registers run in parallel. So a name can be clear of EU-level registrations and still collide with a national mark in a market you care about, or vice versa. That’s why checking only one register is never enough, and it’s why TMview — which queries EUIPO and the national offices together — is the more useful starting point for a broad sweep.

Wasn’t this called OHIM, or a Community trade mark?

It was, and both names were retired on the same day. If you’ve been told to search “the OHIM database” or to check the “Community trade mark register,” you’re working from advice written before 23 March 2016 — and the terminology has tripped up founders ever since, because the old names are still all over the web.

On that date, Regulation (EU) 2015/2424 came into force and did two renamings at once:

• The Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) became the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).
• The Community trade mark (CTM) became the European Union trade mark (EUTM).

Note the date carefully if you’re checking this yourself: the regulation was published in December 2015, but unlike most EU regulations it did not take effect twenty days later — its own Article 4 set entry into force at 23 March 2016.

Two practical consequences. First, “Community trade mark” is no longer a valid status for anything. There is no live CTM register to search and no current registration carrying that label. If you owned a CTM before the change, you own an EUTM today — same registration number, same filing and priority dates, same rights, granted automatically with no refiling, fee or action required of you. Second, the law itself has moved on again: the operative text since 1 October 2017 is Regulation (EU) 2017/1001, a codification that replaced both the 2015 amendment and the older 2009 regulation. A guide still citing Regulation (EC) 207/2009 as the current basis is out of date.

So when a search result, forum post or old blog tells you to look up the “EU trademark registry” under either legacy name, it means the EUIPO register — and the tool you want is below.

Where do you actually search?

Two tools cover the essentials, and both are free:

• EUIPO eSearch plus is the authoritative database for EUTMs themselves. Search your candidate name and look at what comes back: is each mark live, what goods and services does it cover, and how close is it to yours?
• TMview casts the wider net. It aggregates trademark data from dozens of participating offices — the EUIPO, the EU’s national registers, and many non-EU offices — in one multilingual interface. If you only run one search, run this one. One thing that confuses people: TMview is coordinated and maintained by the EUIPO, but it lives on the tmdn.org domain rather than EUIPO’s own, so it can look like a third-party site when it isn’t.

Search technique matters as much as the tool. Start with the exact name, then loosen: alternate spellings, phonetic near-matches, the name with and without spaces or vowels. Trademark conflicts turn on confusing similarity, not identical strings — a sound-alike in your industry can be a real problem even if the spelling differs. For what to make of the results (classes of goods and services, live versus dead marks, how similarity is judged), our trademark basics guide walks through the general framework.

Why can one country’s earlier right block your entire EU mark?

This is the trait that makes EU clearance unforgiving, and it follows directly from the EUTM’s unitary character. Because the right is all-or-nothing across the EU, a conflicting earlier right in any single member state can defeat the entire EU-wide application. A small company with an older national registration in one country can oppose your EUTM, and if the opposition succeeds, you don’t lose protection in that one country — the whole application falls.

There is a fallback: a conversion mechanism lets a defeated EUTM application be converted into national filings in the countries where no conflict existed, keeping the original filing date. But that means separate national applications and fees — the streamlined single-filing advantage is gone, and you’ve paid for the fight along the way.

For a founder still choosing a name, the lesson is simple: the EU register isn’t 27 independent chances to be lucky. One overlooked earlier right anywhere in the EU can be enough to disrupt your plans, so search widely before the name is on your incorporation papers, your domain, and your landing page.

If the domain is available, isn’t the name clear?

No — and this is the most common and most expensive misunderstanding in naming. Domain registration and trademark rights are entirely separate systems. A registrar checks whether a string is unclaimed in the DNS; it checks nothing about whether the name infringes someone’s mark. Plenty of domains are freely available precisely because prudent businesses saw a trademark conflict and walked away.

The reverse is also true: owning the domain gives you no trademark rights in the name. Treat the two as different questions asked in a fixed order — trademark first, because it’s the layer that can legally force a rename, then the domain, then handles and the rest. Where naming fits into the full picture, from brainstorming to shortlist testing, is covered in our complete guide on how to name a startup.

What does a sensible pre-naming check look like?

For each serious candidate on your shortlist, in order:

1. Search TMview for the exact name and close variants, across the EU offices at minimum.
2. Search eSearch plus to look specifically at live EUTMs and how their goods and services compare to yours.
3. Note near-matches, not just exact hits. A similar name aimed at similar customers is the combination that generates disputes.
4. Do a plain web and social search for businesses already trading under the name, since real-world use can matter even without a registration you can find.
5. Take anything murky to a trademark attorney before you commit — especially if you found a close mark in a related field.

The cheapest moment to run these checks is while you still have alternatives. That’s the practical argument for generating more names than you need: if your favorite fails clearance, the second-favorite is already on the list. Domain Yoga gives you a deep pool of distinctive, available candidates to run through exactly this process — so a trademark surprise costs you an afternoon, not a rebrand.