Book Trademark Checker

No — and that is deliberate. We match the exact wording, ignoring case, punctuation, spacing and accents, so “Spider-Man”, “Spider Man” and “Spiderman” all find the same records. We do not check phonetic or visually similar marks (“Kwik” vs “Quick”), which is a core part of what an attorney's clearance search covers. A fuzzy search on a page carrying a legal disclaimer would produce a lot of scary-looking near-misses that mean nothing, and a noisy read is worse than an honest narrow one. Treat a clean result as “this exact wording isn't already registered”, never as “this name is available”.

Not on the strength of this check alone. Finding no match means we found no US federal trademark record whose text matches your title — it is a statement about our index, not about your legal position. It does not cover state registrations, unregistered common-law rights, marks outside the United States, or confusingly similar names. Book titles themselves usually can't be trademarked, but series names, character names, and brand names frequently are. Talk to a trademark attorney before committing to a series or a brand.

Because a live trademark in class 25 (clothing) does not stop you titling a book, and treating every class as equally threatening is what makes naive checkers useless. Class 16 is printed matter including books, class 9 covers downloadable publications (ebooks), and class 41 covers education and entertainment services — where series and character franchises are usually registered. A live registration in one of those three is the situation actually worth taking seriously.

Live means registered and in force — it can be asserted against you today. Pending means applied for but not yet registered: it cannot be asserted as a registration now, but it signals intent and may register later, which matters if you are planning a series. Dead means abandoned, cancelled, or expired. We show dead marks rather than hiding them, because the name having been claimed before is worth knowing — and because their absence would look like a gap in the data.

From the US federal register itself — USPTO's own filing data, reached through a licensed trademark data provider that syncs from USPTO daily. There is no public USPTO trademark *search* API: TESS was retired in 2023, and the one documented API resolves a serial number you already know. If our source is ever unavailable, the tool tells you so instead of showing you an empty result — a blank answer you can't distinguish from 'nothing matched' is the one thing a check like this must never do.

Every search costs us real money against a licensed data source, and an open endpoint over the whole US register is an obvious bulk-extraction target. A free sign-in plus fair-use limits is how the tool stays free and fast for authors instead of scrapers. The page, the methodology, and these answers stay public — only the search itself needs an account.

No. This searches US federal records only. If you publish into the UK, EU, Canada, or Australia stores, those jurisdictions have separate registers and a name that is free in one can be taken in another.