How to use the Trademark Analysis feature
What is it?
This tool compares all 4 million trademarks in our database against all of the products in your stores at once and allows you to explore each match in detail. There is a summary version for Basic agencies and the detailed version for Premium agencies.
See also the Trademark Search tool.
Where is it?
This is an agency management tool. Look for the "Trademarks" button on your "My account" page on login:
You can also find it among the tabs when managing your account.
How to use it
The summary view for Basic agencies is straightforward. It shows a list of your stores and how many of the products in them have texts that match at least one of the trademarks:
The version seen by members of Premium agencies is quite different:
The top level of this tree is a list of all the "marks" (trademark texts) that were found among your products. Expand one of those to see a list of trademarks that use that exact mark. And also a list of your stores where that text was found. Expand a store to see a list of the exact products found.
When you expand a trademark you'll see some very basic information to help you understand its limited scope and how it relates to your products, if at all. Click on the serial number to open the USPTO's detail page to get all the details of that case.
You'll see a "(pending)" flag on cases to indicate that they are not yet active trademarks. Many trademarks filed each year are rejected. So it's nice to see this distinction:
What is a product match?
When you see a number in the "Products" column that means our processor searched our database and found the exact "mark" text of that trademark in one or more products' texts (name, tags, or description).
It's critical to emphasize that this does not mean that any of those products is in violation of that trademark. A trademark of a brand is not a blanket right to sue everyone who uses that word or phrase in every possible context. Every trademark has a limited usage described in its case file. The vast majority of textual matches in our database will be purely coincidental and not constitute any violation. But that's why it's important to explore these trademarks in detail. You should familiarlize yourself with the basics of trademarks if you are unsure.
Technical caveats
There are significant computational costs when dealing with a large data set like the USPTO's and our own product listing. A raw match search would likely take hours. We built some mechanisms to precompute some data that helps speed up the matches so you instead see results in seconds.
One important tradeoff to this precomputation is that product counts and matches may not be 100% accurate to the moment. We reprocess the full data set every 24 hours. If you made no changes in the past 24 hours then the results should be accurate. If you've added products since then, they may not be among the matches shown or counted.
Also. If it's not obvious, we are only doing text matching. We do not do image matching.
Also worth noting that this is not a magic tool. It cannot automatically find violations per se. So we cannot and do not use this tool ourselves to proactively seek out trademark violations for automatic removal. It is still the responsibility of third parties to report trademark and copyright violations.