WWW Trademark Searching
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has in recent years made some of their resources available over the World Wide Web. The USPTO now offers free WWW searching for trademarks. The USPTO trademark database is called TESS (Trademark Electronic Search System). Please see the USPTO website for exact coverage.
Resources available at the USPTO website:
For a complete list of services offered by the office, please see the USPTO's website.
For more information on Patents and Trademarks, please visit our Patents and Trademarks Research Guide.
For more information on Copyright, please visit our Copyright Basics Research Guide.
Did you know that . . .
It takes approximately 24 months to register a patent in the U.S. - from initial filing to when the patent is granted.
The USPTO has approximately 8,000 Patent Examiners on staff.
There is a backlog of approximately 500,000 unexamined patent applications. For more information, please visit the USPTO Patent Data Visualization Dashboard.
The cost of applying for a non-provisional patent can be the following:
For a mechanical tool can be $12,000
For an electronic product can be $14,000
For a computer implemented method for facilitating certain functionality via the Internet can be $20,000- $23,000
In addition, other cost include office actions, issuance and maintenance fees
From: Quinn, Gene (2015/04/15) Cost of Obtaining a Patent Retrieved from http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/04/04/the-cost-of-obtaining-a-patent-in-the-us/id=56485/
. . . so the sooner you get started on your patent application research, the better!
If you intend to make, use, or sell an invention of yours, you should find out whether someone else has created something like it already. You have a number of options when it comes to searching for patents. Below are some patent searching sites.