As I mentioned in my last blog post, the USPTO’s new online Trademark Center now includes a feature that makes it much easier to conduct a trademark image search. This means that instead of scouring the Trademark Design Search Code Manual to try to identify the design attributes that a logo or proposed design possesses, you can ask the new AI-powered search system to look for marks that are similar to an image that you upload. In this article, I will describe the step-by-step process for conducting a trademark image search of the USPTO’s database.
Step-by-Step Guide to USPTO Image Search
Time needed: 10 minutes
An illustrated step-by-step guide to searching with the USPTO’s new Trademark Image Search tool
- Log in to your USPTO account.
You can access the Trademark Image Search tool only when you are logged in to a USPTO account. Visit uspto.gov and click the “MyUSPTO” tab at the top of the screen. You will be offered three options: “Log in with your USPTO.gov account,” “Create a USPTO.gov account,” or “Reactivate my USPTO.gov account.” Make the appropriate selection for your situation.
- Navigate to the “Search Trademarks” page
Open the “Trademarks” tab at the top of the screen. Then click on the “Search trademarks” link. This will load the primary search bar page. The dropdown menu on the left defaults to “Wordmark” but you will change this in the next steps.
- (Optional) Initiate a design code search.
ou can skip this step if you are only interested in using the USPTO’s new Image Search tool. The USPTO recommends using both the new tool and the old design code method. To search for an image the old-fashioned way, select Design code from the dropdown menu on the left end of the search bar. Then type your search code into the text box. Alternatively, you can opt to search by field tags. To do that, select Field Tags and Search builder from the dropdown menu. When you select this option, you can search for design codes using the “DC” field tag. Searching with field tags has the advantage of enabling you to build a search string specifying more than one parameter.
- (Optional) Find the right design code(s).
Design codes are listed in the USPTO’s Trademark Search Design Code Manual. Each one consists of a series of numbers. Top-level categories are represented by the first couple of numbers. The numbers to the right represent increasingly specific subcategories. It can take a while to find the appropriate design code(s) for a logo you wish to search.
- Select “Image search” from the dropdown menu.
To access the new Image Search tool, select “Image search” from the dropdown menu on the left side of the search bar.
- Click the camera icon.
A small image of a camera is located on the right end of the search bar. Click it. A pop-up window inviting you to upload your image will appear.
- Upload the image.
You can upload your image three ways. (1) Drag and drop it into the box; (2) Click “Browse files” to select a local drive file; (3) Paste a direct image URL into the box. Ensure your file is a JPEG, PNG, GIF, or TIFF under 2 MB, then click “Next.”
- Ensure “Image search” is selected.
The search bar should now display a thumbnail image of the logo you uploaded. The dropdown menu should have “Image search” selected.
- Correct the dropdown selection, if needed.
If the dropdown menu is displaying “Wordmark” or anything else, change it to “Image search.” You should now have a screen displaying a thumbnail of your image, “Image search” selected in the dropdown menu, and small camera and magnifying glass icons at the right end of the search bar.
- Click the Search icon.
Click on the magnifying glass icon to execute the image search. A screen displaying one or more trademark records matching your query should appear. The illustrative trademark image search I conducted using the Nike logo turned up several matches. You can filter these using the controls in the left sidebar. For example, you could limit results to “live” registrations and applications, if you wish. You can also restrict the results to specific classes of goods and services. You can also sort the results in various ways, such as by relevance, alphabetically, etc.
- Click a record for more details.
To learn more about a record that turned up in your search results, click on it. That will take you to a page with a lot of information about it. You’ll find an image of the mark, the serial and/or registration number, as applicable, the class(es) of goods
- Scroll for more information.
If you scroll down the webpage for a record, you will find a huge amount of information about the trademark and its owner.
- Review prosecution history
You can find information about the trademark’s prosecution history and relevant documents.
- Toggle to TSDR.
The Trademark Center enables you to toggle from the trademark image search results to the Trademark Status and Document Retrieval (TSDR) entries for a record. In TSDR, you can select three different tabs: (1) Status; (2) Documents; (3) Maintenance. The “Status” tab provides much of the same information you can find by clicking on a record in the Search results page. The Documents and Maintenance tabs provide access to much more.
- Access documents.
The Documents tab in TSDR gives you access to the documents that have been filed in regard to the trademark application or registration you are reviewing. These include things like specimens of use, registration certificates, office actions and responses, and others. The “Maintenance” tab provides information about renewals and such.
- Review filings.
You can access a document listed in the Documents tab by clicking on the hypertext link for it. This enables you to review the specimen of use that was submitted in support of an application for registration of a particular trademark, for example.
Limitations
The Trademark Center’s new trademark image search functionality will be a major timesaver in those cases where the image you are searching matches one that is in the USPTO’s database of trademark registrations and applications. When I searched with the familiar Nike logo and sorted results by relevance, for example, a number of exact matches turned up, and I gained almost immediate access to a wealth of information about it. The new Image Search should be very useful for conducting knock-out searches in those situations where a proposed logo happens to match an existing one.
Its capabilities are a bit more limited, however, when it comes to advanced trademark searches for potentially similar images. I tested it by uploading a random picture of a mosquito.
These are the first few of at least a thousand results this image search turned up:
This was even after filtering out “dead” results, limiting the search to IC 005, and sorting the results by relevance.
Being a Minnesotan, I can sort of understand the relevance of the ones with airplanes in them. Both airplanes and mosquitoes fly, after all. And mosquitoes can indeed be big here. The likelihood that consumers would confuse any of these logos with a mosquito, however, seems to me to be about as close to zero as it is possible to get.
Currently, “Field tags and Search builder” is a single selection in the dropdown menu, and there isn’t a field tag that represents the results of an image search. This means that when you are using field tags, it is still necessary to rely on traditional design search codes. It would be a major upgrade if the USPTO allowed users to combine Image Search and Field Tag searching together, allowing you to constrain visual AI results by the strict specifications set out in field tags.
Nevertheless, I am still enthusiastic about the Trademark Center’s new AI-assisted image analysis functionality. I am sure it will also be very useful in terms of drafting acceptable descriptions of logos to include in applications.
