The US Patent and Trademark Office announced on Friday that its
trade mark application files will now be accessible on-line, free
of charge. The files include the decisions, and the reasons behind
those decisions, made by trade mark examining attorneys.
Until now the only trade mark data available to the public from
the USPTO web site has related to federally registered and pending
trade marks – of which there are nearly two million dating back to
1885 – and status information.
The new system, known as Trademark Document Retrieval (TDR),
extends the scope of information available on-line to the documents
in over 460,000 official trade mark applications files.
As new applications are filed, says the USPTO, they will be
added to the database. Over the next five years the remaining paper
files of around 1.2 million active trade mark registrations will be
converted into digital format for TDR access.
"Trade marks help consumers distinguish among products and
services and are often an organisation's most valuable asset," said
Jon Dudas, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property
and Director of the USPTO. "The TDR system improves our ability to
provide timely and useful information to business owners as they
develop their marks and prepare to file trade mark
applications."
