The IPOPHL API for trademark search
Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines support is in active development. Join the waitlist to get notified when IPOPHL ships on Signa's unified trademark API.
What is IPOPHL?
The Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL) is the independent government agency responsible for administering and implementing trademark, patent, utility model, industrial design, and copyright registration in the Philippines. Created by Republic Act 8293 — the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, which took effect on 1 January 1998 — IPOPHL reports directly to the Office of the President and operates from its headquarters at the McKinley Hill Cyberpark in Taguig City. The Philippines is the second-most populous country in ASEAN after Indonesia, and with roughly 44,000 new trademark applications filed per year and a register of approximately 700,000 live and dead records dating back through the pre-1998 Philippine Patent Office era, IPOPHL administers one of the largest trademark corpora in Southeast Asia.
The Philippines acceded to the Madrid Protocol on 25 April 2012, with the treaty entering into force for the Philippines on 25 July 2012, making it the seventh ASEAN member to join the Madrid System. Madrid designations of the Philippines now account for a meaningful share of new filings — IPOPHL acts as both office of origin for outbound Filipino international registrations and as a designated office that examines inbound Madrid designations under the same IP Code as direct national filings. The Philippines' accession came with a reservation: international registrations dated before 25 July 2012 cannot be subsequently extended to the Philippines. IPOPHL's register is conducted primarily in English, which is one of the two official languages of the Philippines alongside Filipino — making it one of the most English-friendly registers in Asia for foreign filers, though Filipino-language marks and transliterations of Filipino, Spanish, and Chinese script appear throughout the corpus.
IPOPHL exposes the register through eTMfile (the online filing system launched in 2018 and overhauled in 2023), the IPOPHL Trademark eRegistry web search, and ASEAN TMview — the regional aggregator IPOPHL itself manages on behalf of the ASEAN Working Group on Intellectual Property Cooperation. Bulk programmatic access is limited: there is no documented general-purpose public REST API for full-featured search, and downstream tools largely consume IPOPHL data via the ASEAN TMview feed or scrape the eRegistry. Signa is building its IPOPHL connector against the available eRegistry and ASEAN TMview data channels for Q4 2026 launch; on launch it will normalize Philippine application number formats, IP Code event vocabulary, and Madrid designations of the Philippines into the same unified schema used for USPTO, EUIPO, IPOS, and every other office on the platform.
Unique features
- ASEAN regional integration — IPOPHL itself hosts and manages ASEAN TMview, the common online trademark register for all 10 ASEAN member states; Philippine marks are queryable both through IPOPHL's national eRegistry and through the ASEAN regional aggregator
- English-language register — the Philippines is one of two ASEAN jurisdictions (alongside Singapore) where the trademark register is conducted primarily in English, with Filipino marks and Spanish/Chinese transliterations as supplementary scripts; no translation tier required for most foreign-filer workflows
- Madrid Protocol member since 25 July 2012 — Madrid designations of the Philippines come through the WIPO feed and live alongside direct national filings, with the 25 July 2012 accession date acting as a hard cutoff for retroactive extension
- Intellectual Property Code (R.A. 8293) — the unified IP statute that took effect 1 January 1998 governs trademarks, patents, designs, and copyright under one law; appeals from IPOPHL go to the Director General then to the Court of Appeals
- Second-most populous ASEAN nation — at ~117 million people, the Philippines drives one of the largest national trademark filing volumes in Southeast Asia, with ~44,000 new applications per year and meaningful non-resident filings from US, Japanese, and Chinese applicants
- 30-day opposition window from publication in the IPOPHL e-Gazette — among the shorter opposition periods globally, with automatic registration on the next calendar day after expiry if no opposition is filed
- eTMfile online filing system — IPOPHL's 24/7 electronic filing platform launched in 2018 and overhauled in 2023, linked to ASEAN TMclass for goods/services classification and ASEAN TMview for preliminary search reports
- Declaration of Actual Use requirement — Philippine registrants must file a DAU at the 3rd anniversary, 5th anniversary, and every renewal; this drives a distinctive event stream in the prosecution history that Signa normalizes into the canonical status object
IPOPHL API — Frequently asked questions
Everything developers ask before integrating IPOPHL data
Need something else? See our documentation
IPOPHL API basics
Coverage & Philippines trademark quirks
Need something else? See our documentation
Get notified when IPOPHL ships on Signa?
Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines support is in active development. Join the waitlist for IPOPHL — and start exploring the offices Signa already supports today.
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