Acceptable Identification of Goods and Services Manual

The Acceptable Identification of Goods and Services Manual is a directory maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office outlining the different categories of goods and services recognized by that office with respect to trademark registrations, and setting forth the forty-two international classes into which those goods and services are divided.

In order for an applicant to receive a trademark registration, that applicant must describe the goods and/or services to which the mark applies, and which classes those goods and/or services fall under. If the description is vague or does not match the content permitted in the classes claimed, then the application may be rejected until the applicant provides an acceptable description. By using the language set forth in the Manual, the applicant can be certain that the application will not be rejected on such a basis.

The Manual is searchable with various Boolean operators, which are described in the introduction to the Manual. Only the first 100 results of a search will be returned, so a search term that shows more than 100 results will have to be refined to reveal all relevant results. For example, searching for "SOFTWARE" returns a report that there are 225 results, but all 100 of the results shown are for goods in class 009, which includes all kinds of software. However, refining the search by seeking "SALES AND SOFTWARE" returns only two results - one for goods in class 009, and the other for services in class 035, which covers "Outsourcing in the field of sales and marketing of computer software".

External links

• Acceptable Identification of Goods and Services Manual on the USPTO website.