USPTO’s Trademark Search System
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) retired its legacy Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) on November 30, 2023. The legacy search system has been replaced with a new, ‘cloud-based’ trademark electronic search system (see https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search news release and search system link).
The new search system allows users to search the U.S. trademark database with a Basic search tool primarily for new users or an Expert search tool primarily for experienced users. Both tools provide for custom text searching within the U.S. trademark database. The Expert search tool allows the user to utilize a wide variety of field tags, wildcards, logical operators, "regular expressions", quantifiers, groupings, and other inputs to further refine searches. Notably, a list of sample inputs for the Expert search tool can be found at https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/help.
Users accustomed to former TESS will also notice that the new search system has an improved interface that is more intuitive and customizable. Users can easily filter/sort search results, toggle between different views, and/or export search data to quickly and efficiently locate US trademarks and trademark applications. Each search result is also directly linked to the Trademark Status & Document Retrieval (TSDR https://tsdr.uspto.gov/), which allows a user to view official documents associated with a trademark application or registered trademark.
WIPO Global Brand Database
The Global Brand Database (https://branddb.wipo.int/), maintained by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), is a free tool that is fantastic for finding marks that may be in use or registered internationally, whether for clearance and brand monitoring purposes. The Global Brand Database provides a single platform for searching international trademarks under the Madrid System as well as many regional (e.g., the EU) and national (e.g., Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Germany, the UK) offices. A full list of sources for the database records can be found at the following link: https://branddb.wipo.int/en/coverage.
As shown in the screenshot, the “Quick Search” tab on the homepage of the database supports keyword searching with wildcards by brand name, owner, or publication/application number. Additional tabs on the homepage support specific searching “By Brand Name,” “By Brand Logo,” and “By Goods and Services.” These tabs provide the user with search strategy options to tailor the results in various ways, for example, brand name search results can include the exact term as entered, similarly spelled results, or phonetic equivalents. Searching by brand logo via uploading an image provides search strategy options to tailor results using conceptual similarity (i.e., AI is utilized to determine “concepts” within the image and to match results with similar concepts), shape similarity, and color similarity. An example of conceptual similarity search results is included in the table below:
As shown in the screenshot above, the “Quick Search” tab on the homepage of the database supports keyword searching with wildcards by brand name, owner, or publication/application number. Additional tabs on the homepage support specific searching “By Brand Name,” “By Brand Logo,” and “By Goods and Services.” These tabs provide the user with search strategy options to tailor the results in various ways, for example, brand name search results can include the exact term as entered, similarly spelled results, or phonetic equivalents. Searching by brand logo via uploading an image provides search strategy options to tailor results using conceptual similarity (i.e., AI is utilized to determine “concepts” within the image and to match results with similar concepts), shape similarity, and color similarity. An example of conceptual similarity search results is included in the table below:
The user can toggle between presentations of search results in grid/list views and statistics views. As shown in the screenshots below, the statistics views include a variety of graphs that provide the user with a sense of the classes included in the results as well as their geographic distribution and live/dead registration status. Each of the statistics views can further be easily used as inclusion/exclusion filters for the results, such that a few clicks can drill down on desired results (e.g., all registered results in Canada in class 30).
The search systems briefly discussed above can be incorporated into any trademark and/or brand search strategy and are accessible to anyone conducting searching tasks. If you have questions regarding these search systems, please contact your attorney at Andrus Intellectual Property Law.
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