The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) (French: Office de l'Union européenne pour la propriété intellectuelle) is a decentralised agency of the EU responsible for the registration of EU-wide unitary trade marks and industrial design rights.

[1] These exist alongside the intellectual property rights of individual EU member states, so the agency also works to harmonise EU-wide and national registration processes.

EUIPO was founded in 1994 and was formerly known as the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), but was renamed in March 2016 to reflect major reforms.

The registered Community design (RCD) also grants exclusive rights throughout the European Union and future Member States.

Its work also includes the harmonisation of registration practices for trade marks and designs and the development of common intellectual property (IP) management tools.

Since 2012, the EUIPO has managed the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights, a network of public and private stakeholders working against piracy and counterfeiting.

[citation needed] The regulation establishing the EUIPO was adopted by the Council of the European Union in December 1993 and revised on two occasions, in 2009 and in 2015.

It created the European Union trade mark (formerly known as the Community trade mark) as a legal instrument in European Union law and established the EUIPO (then known as Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market, or OHIM) as an EU agency with legal, administrative and financial autonomy.

[2] On 23 March 2016, the agency changed its name to the European Union Intellectual Property Office upon the entry into force of Regulation 2015/2424.

[9] A new EU Regulation on geographical indication protection for craft and industrial products was published on 27 October 2023 and entered into force on 16 November 2023.