Quality Declaration

Institutional environment

For information on the institutional environment of IP Australia, including the legislative obligations and authority, financing and governance arrangements, please see About Us.

Relevance

Australian Trade Mark Search makes public trade mark information discoverable by trade mark information consumers.

Timelines

Australian Trade Mark Search contains trade mark record data dating back to 1906. The data in Australian Trade Mark Search is updated daily.

Accuracy

IP Australia strives to provide the best quality data. However, most of the data available in Australian Trade Mark Search is provided by 3rd parties.

IP Australia performed a major data migration in November 2018. As a result of this migration:

• Parts of Endorsements, which were previously a single unstructured search and display field, have been separated out into more structured forms. For accuracy and completeness, all historical records have kept a reference to the Endorsement as it was previously, before the migration took place, in the field called “Endorsements as at November 10 2018”. This is a point-in-time representation of the Endorsements at that date. Please contact IP Australia if you have any questions or concerns about discrepancies between information contained in the “Endorsements as at November 10 2018” and elsewhere on the trade mark’s details.
• There may have been some inaccuracies introduced in trade mark data during the migration. Please contact IP Australia if you identify any such inaccuracies.
• As a result of manual back capture efforts, not all historical records contain all data fields. Where a historical record is incomplete, IP Australia has made best effort to display any information available about the record.
• Regulated Signs (those records identified with a number beginning with -9) have undergone changes, including introducing Active/Ceased statuses, more granular details and being included across all Classes. For records that refer to Article 6ter, the World Intellectual Property Organization is the authoritative source. For records that refer to other pieces of legislation, those are the authoritative source. These Regulated Signs are provided through Australian Trade Mark Search as a reference only in the context of trade mark search results.
• The History and Publications view is a subset of the internal processing steps that have occurred for each trade mark. Data presented in the History may not contain all transactions or reflect the sequence order of transactions. History events that occurred prior to IP Australia’s data migration in November 2018 contain a representation of the content that was stored on the legacy system.

Otherwise, Australian Trade Mark Search is a representation of the trade marks IP rights data held by IP Australia.

Coherence

Australian Trade Mark Search contains information about older trade marks that rarely change, and information about newer trade marks and pending trade mark applications that may change more frequently. The information in this system is updated regularly. The count of trade marks and applications in any particular status will not be coherent with any other published information from IP Australia, including the bulk data products mentioned under the Accessibility section of this document. The information presented in any other publication or dataset representing trade mark information in Australia can only ever be a point-in-time view and not the most up-to-date or current view.

To see the up-to-date status of any transactional requests or transactional information you have submitted to IP Australia, you should check IP Australia’s online transactional system, eServices.

IP Australia performed a major data migration in November 2018. In some circumstances, searches run after the migration may return different results than the same search run prior to the data migration. Equivalent searches should continue to retrieve equivalent results. For details about the changes made, see the IP Australia system upgrade for trade marks information, and refer to the system’s Help page for updated details of search functionality.

As part of the major data migration in November 2018, there has been an alignment of publication information across Australian Trade Mark Search and the historical Journals.

Interpretability

Interpretation of the information in Australian Trade Mark Search is based in concepts described in the Trade Marks Act 1995. Information in Australian Trade Mark Search relates to trade mark applications submitted for registration in Australia by trade mark applicants.

In addition to containing information about the scope, status and ownership of trade mark applications in Australia, Australian Trade Mark Search also includes information about some key processing statuses within IP Australia.

Several statuses may be confusing to consumers of Australian trade mark information. To assist with your understanding some of these statuses are explained below:

• Trade marks found searching across the Status groups Pending or Registered may prevent similar trade marks from being registered.
• Trade marks found searching across the Status groups Refused, Removed or Never Registered may not prevent similar trade marks from being registered, and often serve to more generally inform searchers about other trade mark records.
• Trade marks in the Statuses of Published: Awaiting Indexing or Published: Awaiting Examination are applications that have not yet been assessed.

Many more statuses and their descriptions can be found in the system Help page

Accessibility

Reports from this system are available in either PDF or Excel format. IP Australia does not currently provide extracts of data from this system outside of these formats. For information about other data relating to trade marks, please see Bulk Data Products .

Updated on: 17 May 2024