The INPI_PT API for trademark search

The Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial (INPI Portugal) is the Portuguese national authority responsible for examining and registering trademarks, patents, utility models, and industrial designs in Portugal. Headquartered in Lisbon and operating under the Ministry of Justice, INPI administers the Portuguese industrial property register under the Código da Propriedade Industrial — the consolidated Industrial Property Code approved by Decree-Law No. 110/2018 of 10 December 2018, which transposes EU Directive 2015/2436 into Portuguese law. The register holds roughly 700,000 records and receives approximately 21,500 new national trademark applications per year, plus around 1,000 Madrid Protocol designations of Portugal, with 96% of direct filings coming from Portuguese residents and the United States, Spain, and Brazil leading the foreign applicant pool.

Portugal is an EU member state, so most applicants seeking broad European protection file an EU trademark (EUTM) at EUIPO — a single EUTM covers Portugal and the other 26 EU member states for a fee comparable to a Portuguese national filing. INPI's national register exists for applicants who only need Portuguese protection, who face EU-wide prior rights that would block a wider EUTM, or who want to lock in an earlier Portuguese seniority date before extending via Madrid. Portugal acceded to the Madrid Protocol on 20 March 1997, so the country can also be designated through WIPO as an alternative to a direct INPI filing. Crucially for non-European applicants, INPI Portugal is also the natural Lusophone entry point into Europe — Portuguese-language filings, an examination vocabulary shared with INPI Brazil under the same Latin-derived Industrial Property Code lineage, and the PALOP cooperation network linking Portugal with Brazil and the six Portuguese-speaking African nations (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea) plus East Timor.

INPI exposes the register through Marcas e Outros Sinais, the free public search at servicosonline.inpi.justica.gov.pt — a Portuguese-language web UI for trademarks and other distinctive signs, with no authentication required and no rate limits documented. Prosecution events publish in the Boletim da Propriedade Industrial (BPI), the official bulletin whose publication triggers the two-month opposition window under the Código da Propriedade Industrial. There is no general-purpose public REST API for the Portuguese trademark register; bulk programmatic access means scraping Marcas e Outros Sinais and parsing each BPI release. Signa is building its INPI Portugal connector for Q3 2026; on launch it will normalize the Portuguese-language register, the Código da Propriedade Industrial event vocabulary, and Madrid designations of Portugal into the same unified schema used for USPTO, EUIPO, INPI Brazil, and every other office — giving Lusophone customers a single endpoint that bridges the Portuguese, Brazilian, and PALOP markets without three separate scrapers.