The BOIP API for trademark search

The Benelux Office for Intellectual Property (BOIP) is the official authority for registering trademarks and designs across the three Benelux countries — the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Headquartered in The Hague, it is the executing body of the Benelux Union (an intergovernmental organisation between the three states) and operates under the Benelux Convention on Intellectual Property (BCIP), a single piece of law that replaced the separate national trademark systems of NL, BE, and LU back in 1971. There is no Dutch national trademark, no Belgian national trademark, and no Luxembourg national trademark — the Benelux is treated as one trademark territory, and BOIP is the only office that grants direct trademark rights in any of the three countries.

A single BOIP filing covers all three Benelux countries with one application, one fee, one register entry, and one renewal — the same unitary model EUIPO uses for the wider EU, but at the regional Benelux scale. BOIP receives roughly 20,000–25,000 trademark applications per year and processes them remarkably quickly, with an average examination time around 4.7 working days. Applicants can file in Dutch, French, or English (the BOIP working languages), with German also accepted for transfer, priority, and licence documents. After publication a 2-month opposition window opens before registration issues, and the granted right is protected for 10 years from filing, renewable indefinitely. Because Benelux is treated as one country for Madrid Protocol purposes, international applicants who want NL, BE, or LU coverage designate "BX" (Benelux) as a single block through WIPO rather than picking the three countries individually.

BOIP publishes its trademark data through the public Benelux Trademarks Register at boip.int (with text search, image search via an AI-powered tool, and per-record export) and through Datolite — a paid daily data-supply service that pushes TM-XML files in the WIPO ST66 standard to a subscriber FTP server, designed for IP firms and registry-watch services that need the full register and daily deltas. Datolite is the official bulk channel; there is no public REST API today, so most builders either pay for Datolite and write their own FTP poller, XML parser, and Dutch/French event-vocabulary mapper, or fall back to scraping the public register. Signa is building its BOIP connector against Datolite for Q3 2026; on launch it will normalise the trilingual register, the BCIP event vocabulary, and Madrid designations of BX into the same unified JSON schema already used for USPTO, EUIPO, WIPO, and every other office on the platform.