The following is an edited transcript of my video All About the New USPTO Trademark Search System.
At the end of November, 2023, the USPTO launched a brand new search platform for their trademark database. This meant the retirement after more than 20 years of the prior search system, TESS, which had many limitations. The new system is called Trademark Search. Learning how to use it is not simple. I dedicated many hours, listened to webinars, taught a webinar, and practiced extensively on my own so that I could be an expert to help my clients and to other attorneys.
The new system was in beta for about a month or two before the full launch, but many of the features were not fully released until right near the end of the beta. In fact, features are continuously being tweaked and updated, which is a good thing. One of the benefits of this new system is that it’s built on a much more stable, agile platform, meaning modifications, updates, tweaks can be made along the way and in smaller increments without having to freeze it, take it down, and make huge coding changes. All in all, the new system has so much potential. It’s much faster and much more robust.
It has better visual display, it has better mobile formatting, it has better export options for search results, and it’s faster. It’s also much better at doing challenging, nuanced searches like searching for characters, dates, or images. You can’t search for an image just by using a graphic, but the ways that you can search for images is better than the old system.
You can find it and see for yourself at tmsearch.uspto.gov.
For more resources and information about searching trademarks, see here.
