Glossary

What is Trademark?

A trademark is a registered mark identifying the commercial source of a product, searchable in public registers such as the USPTO's.

Last checked 11 October 2026

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Why it matters

Whether a brand holds a registration, and who holds it, is one of the few facts about a gray-market label that can be checked in a public register in seconds.

Sources

Every claim on this page about a statute, an agency instrument or a tariff instrument rests on one of these, and each one is a document you can open. Where a claim could not be checked against a source, it was removed rather than hedged.

  1. The public register. Whether a mark is registered, and to whom, is checkable here in seconds.