Trade marks offer valuable Intellectual Property rights to owners. Infringement is an increasing problem worldwide with much such activity online. The sale of trade mark infringing and counterfeit items on websites such as Ebay, Alibaba, Taobao, is well known and has been the subject of legal action both against sellers and website operators in the EU (see Tiffany v Ebay). The UK's Intellectual Property Office ran a 2013 competition 'How can new technology..(reduce)..markedly the accessibility of infringing products online'. We have a proof of concept (POC) for a fully automated 'break-through' system that can monitor for infringement through similarity of all trade marks by any sales listing for a minuscule cost per mark. Using machine learning to identify product / brand names in sales listings it compares these for aural and visual similarity with all relevant trade marks using our US patented trade mark similarity software (see our site www.trademarkdirect.co.uk). This comparison is considerably more sophisticated than other techniques (e.g. Levenstein) and produces distance measures with much more finely grained results to automatically establish the degree of infringement. The proposed project will see development of a high volume, scaleable prototype based on the POC. Additional new algorithms will be developed for a second function that distinguishes between identically branded items which are legitimate resales and those that are counterfeit. This development work requires the large data sets the prototype will produce, but the POC cannot.

Development of Artificial Intelligence to identify product and brand names in online sales listings so as to enable fully automated monitoring for infringement against registered trade marks, at minimal marginal cost per mark.