The International Trademark Metasearch queries various trademark office registries, including those of the US, Canada, the CTM, Madrid and Japan. It’s been available on this site for no charge since 2001. I view it as an ’80/0′ solution, offerring 80% of the utility of an international knock-out search at 0 of the cost.
However, many trademark offices routinely upgrade their interfaces (necessitating new code at our end), and many countries are putting their registries online (requiring all new coding). It is a daunting challenge for this firm to maintain this valuable tool alone.
I propose the following. We will upload the existing code to a site such as SourceForge. We will devise an appropriate open license. Hopefully people will step forward and undertake to maintain the interface to one trademark office.
Contact me marty at schwimmerlegal d0t c0m if you have thoughts on this project.