Knockoff Data API v1

The subject is tied to a named enforcement action. Outranks every other check and should stop the workflow.

A check found a conflict: the subject's own claims do not agree with the record. This should also stop the workflow.

We can say who is behind this, and an independent record agrees. For a store, that takes evidence the store itself published: a legal entity on its own site that a corporate registry corroborates. A trademark match alone never verifies a store, because the register answers about a name and any domain can spell one. nike.store matches NIKE's wordmark and tells you nothing about who runs it.

Something was named (an owner, a legal entity) and nothing checked contradicts it. Short of corroboration, not a problem. A store whose domain matches a live trademark but which has not yet published an entity of its own lands here, and the summarysays plainly that nothing ties the two together.

Too little public identity evidence to say who operates this. Thin is not guilty. A real small business that never registered a trademark reads thin, and so does a store that opened last week. Weigh it against the rest of your own signals.

verified named and corroborated by an independent record. identified named, not corroborated. clear we looked and found nothing adverse; checked lists what we looked at. inconclusive we looked and cannot say (an ambiguous register is the common case). contradicted we found a conflict. not_run we did not look; reason says why.

One human sentence. Render it as-is; it is written to be read by a person or an agent without transformation.

Stable machine-readable fact identifiers (operator.mill_filed, identity.registry_corroborated). Write your policy against these, not against the prose. A code names a fact; it never carries a weight. If you want a score, compute it here: your risk policy, our evidence.

The verifiable source behind the finding: TSDR links for register facts, the quoted sentence and URL for a store's own claim, the registry record for a corroborated entity.

Why the check did not run. Telling you what we did not look at is deliberate: a check we could not run must never be mistaken for a check that came back clean. A not_run check still carries empty codes and receipts arrays, so you never have to nil-check them.

matched the brand's marks trace to one distinct owner. ambiguous several distinct owners use this name; we state the marks but claim no owner. no_record no USPTO mark for this string (itself a signal).

live dead none best status among the matched marks.

Present only when a resolve call's title/URL carried product context. The brand is ambiguous register-wide (register_state), but exactly one owner holds its marks in the queried Nice classes, e.g. {"classes": ["021"], "context": "cookware", "register_state": "ambiguous"}. The verdict holds for those classes only: do not cache or reuse it as an unconditional answer for the brand.

One operator holds a calibrated supermajority of the brand's live marks (e.g. {"share": 0.818, "live_marks": 108, "of_live_marks": 132, "other_candidates": [...]}) and is reported as the owner (when the call carried product context, only if that operator also holds live marks in the queried classes). other_candidates discloses every minority filer by name and live-mark count; weigh them before treating the owner claim as exclusive.

The parties this URL is actually about, up to three, each as { type, query, key, document, not_checked }. document is either a full check document — gate on its own state — or explicitly null with a not_checked reason. Types: platform the marketplace or storefront platform, identified but not checked: the counterparty behind the URL is the storefront, so document is explicitly null and not_checked says why. merchant an independent store, keyed by its domain. seller a marketplace seller of record, keyed {marketplace}:{seller_id}; its identity check reads the seller's INFORM disclosure and reaches verified only when that disclosed name and country match a filer on the US register. storefront an Amazon/eBay display store, keyed {marketplace}:store:{slug}; identified but not checked because its display slug does not identify the seller of record. brand the brand the listing claims. The document key is always present so a parser can iterate without a key check.

A brand derived from the store's own domain gets no brand subject. Its name is the store's name, not an independent claim about what it sells, and a verified brand document beside a lookalike storefront would read as an endorsement no check performed.

The URL we actually resolved, and every hygiene step applied to yours. Tracking parameters and fragments are stripped, known marketplace mobile hosts are normalized, and links on known shortener domains are expanded. Identity-bearing parameters are never touched (seller, smid, variant). Read these when an answer surprises you: they name the exact string the grammars saw.

How the brand was resolved, in precedence order: brand the caller's explicit brand. storefront_vendor the store's own product JSON named its vendor. title leading-token heuristic on the scraped title. url a marketplace URL grammar's brand slug. domain nothing else named a brand on a non-marketplace URL, so the candidate is the domain itself (figma.com → figma), and a bare name-match by construction; the facts.state says what the register actually supports. none no brand resolved; merchant context only. (Distinct from presence.source, which names the presence block's own data provenance.)

The seller's identity card, beside the brand's facts. domain (the merchant's identity key), platform + platform_confidence (deterministic = a URL shape the platform doesn't let merchants change, e.g. Shopify's /products/{handle}?variant=; heuristic = a default path shape other platforms can collide with), trademark_footprint (the store name's own facts object), and identity_completeness, which card fields are filled, a coverage statement, never a judgment.

domain_age (months since the domain's RDAP registration date; young domains are the fly-by-night signal), legal_entity (the operating entity named on the site's own legal pages, always with its receipt: {"name", "source_url", "quote"}), and a confirmed platform_confidence are filled by async enrichment: the first resolve of a domain queues it (enrichment: "queued"), later resolves return the enriched card ("complete", or "failed"). Enriched fields may be up to 30 days old: a domain is never re-fetched inside that window.

registrations rides the legal entity: corporate-registry records whose legal name matches the entity named on the site's own pages. GLEIF (lei, jurisdiction, entity status) and SEC EDGAR (cik, ticker), each with a link and the name-match receipt in verification. The chain is own site → legal entity → registry; a registry record never attaches on a bare brand-name guess.

Present when the URL carries an Amazon seller token (/sp?seller=, or seller=/smid= on a product URL): the third-party seller behind the listing. legal_name, country, address_present, and registration_number_present come from the seller's INFORM Consumers Act disclosure as observed on-page (captured_at is the receipt; corroborated = the address was confirmed from ≥2 distinct networks). entity is the seller's shared-address cluster (how many storefronts operate from the same address).

trademark_footprint appears only when the legal name joins a trademark operator under the stated join_basis (entity_country = distinctive entity name + matching country; never a bare name match); it is the seller's own portfolio (distinct_brands, live_marks, mill_filed). An unknown seller returns the id with nulls: the miss is recorded and coverage grows with observation.

Is the party selling this the brand's operator? On a marketplace listing the party compared is the seller of record; on an independent store it is the store itself. sells_direct the seller's disclosed identity and the brand's resolved owner fold to the same entity (distinctive entity name + matching country, the same corroboration bar as join_basis: entity_country), or their registered aliases share a published operator cluster; the basis states entity_country or published_cluster. third_party both identities are comparable and the entities differ. platform_direct the marketplace itself is the seller of record (e.g. Amazon retail's own seller id). unknown nothing provable, with the reason stated (no_seller_token, seller_unresolved, brand_owner_unresolved, identity_not_comparable, or country_mismatch: a same-named entity in a different country proves neither sameness nor difference, so it stays unknown). seller_entity / brand_entity carry the two compared identities as receipts. Never a score.

On an independent store, sells_direct additionally covers the case where the store is the brand's own site (basis: brand_own_site, cited from the brand's resolved footprint) or publishes a legal entity that folds to the brand's register owner (basis: published_entity).

no_discoverable_chain is the value unique to independent stores, and it is an absence, not an accusation: the brand has a named owner, we read the store's own site, we know where the brand's own site is, and nothing joins the two. checked lists exactly what ran. It is never emitted over a lane that has not finished — a storefront still enriching, a footprint still building, or a brand whose own site we never resolved all answer unknown with the reason, because "we have not looked" must never read as "we looked and found nothing." A brand pulled out of the store's own domain gets unknown / no_independent_brand_claim: a store has no chain to answer to its own name.

Is the listing what it claims to be? Composed from crowd-relayed observations (extension sightings, hardened by a 2-network corroboration gate) plus our own reverse-image receipt over the listing's hero image. status is observed or the honest no_observation (coverage is demand-shaped: unseen listings have no data, and none is invented). claim carries the crowd-corroborated identity tuple (attribution, ships-from, duties-paid language, AI-scale flag); hints carries uncorroborated latest-value numerics (sales, shop age); signals lists human-checkable reasons with their evidence grade. receipt is the reverse-image result (catalog_matches = mass-market catalog twins, always with caveat: "copy_direction_unverified". Copycat sites also steal from real artisans). lean is advisory and watch is its ceiling: “worth a human's look, here are the receipts” (lean_basis), never a confident “fake” label. Never a score.

The brand's off-platform footprint: does it exist anywhere besides the listing you found it on? own_site (resolved domain with Ahrefs authority depth: domain rating, organic traffic, referring domains, or resolved: false with the near-miss candidates), wikipedia_url, knowledge_graph, social, marketplaces, storefronts (shop URL, verification receipts, and sales/rating when available), software and reputation (app-store and review-platform profiles, same verification rule), press (web mentions, each with the url and title of the page that named the brand). Filled by demand-gated async enrichment: the first sighting of a brand returns {"status": "queued"}, later calls carry the map. lean is advisory with its lean_basis stated, never a score.

ISO-2 country of the current owner. Only present when matched. An ambiguous brand never gets an owner claim.

Months since the earliest real filing among the matched marks.

Recorded sales of the mark (true ownership changes; renames and collateral liens don't count).

Name of a published operator cluster this brand belongs to. Clusters publish only when public records or calibrated matching rules clear the measured publication bar; the audit basis is returned in operator_footprint.cluster.basis.

How many marks matched, how many live, and on what basis (wordmark / pseudo_mark).

Up to 20 serial numbers with TSDR links, every claim is independently verifiable.

How many distinct brand names this operator holds across the whole register. The headline: a real brand files a handful for its own products; a mass operator files dozens. Counted over the operator's resolved identity, its name variants folded together (see confidence).

The owner's live and total mark counts.

The owner's filing window. 8 brands across a 4-month burst reads very differently from 10 brands across 12 years.

company individual null from the USPTO legal-entity code; an individual holding many brands is a strong mass-filing signal.

True if any of the owner's marks were filed through a high-volume filing attorney whose book is ≥50% CN/HK owners. Most meaningful for small-footprint owners; a century-old global filer can flag on one mark.

{known, size, basis}: whether this operator belongs to a published cluster, how many brands it spans, and its audit trail (record, ai, human, or mixed). Only returned when matched.

resolved_entity the owner's name variants (“Procter & Gamble Company” / “The Procter and Gamble Co.”) were folded into one operator, corroborated by a shared country, so the counts are the operator's true total. exact_name no variant was found, so the counts are keyed on the single filing string and are a floor: an operator filing under variants we couldn't corroborate is undercounted. The fold is a deterministic name+country match, separate from the published cluster inference.

How many distinct owner-name strings were folded into this resolved operator. 1 means none were found (so the counts equal the exact-name floor); higher means variants were merged.

On ambiguous brands the footprint shown is the most prolific candidate owner's; this is how many other candidates exist. 0 when matched.

The lookup’s honest answer: matched (one owner stands behind the name), ambiguous, or no_record. There is no fourth state and no score.

More than one unrelated owner could match this name, so we publish no owner claim rather than guess.

No USPTO trademark matches this exact name. Unregistered brands exist, but there is no registered owner standing behind the name.

Context-conditioned lookups only: the reading of the brand the verdict applies to, when the product title changes which trademark the name means.

Whether the matched registration is live or dead on the register right now. A matched brand whose marks are all dead is an owner claim about the past, and every surface says so.

The current owner of record after following the assignment chain — not necessarily the name on the original filing.

The owner’s register-wide filing stats: distinct brands, live marks, filing span, and the mill flag. The difference between a company with a trademark and an operation with a portfolio.

How many different brand names the owner holds marks for. The single most telling number about a marketplace brand’s owner.

Filed through a filing mill — an attorney who files trademarks in bulk for overseas operators. A fact we report, not a judgment.

Several registered companies that public records show are run as one operation. We only say this when USPTO filings or verified evidence prove the connection — never on a guess.

One owner holds nearly all the live trademarks under this name. The remaining filers are listed by name so nothing is hidden.

How a marketplace seller identity was connected to a trademark owner — e.g. entity_country, a distinctive-name-and-country match. Never a bare name guess; below the bar, no join is published.

The TSDR links: every claim carries the serial numbers of the USPTO records behind it, so you can verify our work in one click.

What the verdict rests on: how many marks matched, how many are live, and on what basis they matched — so you can see how much record stands behind the answer.

Our stated read of the off-platform footprint evidence — protect or watch — with lean_basis naming exactly why. A read of the facts listed beside it, never a score.