IP Sewa — Turning Nepal’s Trademark Archive Into A Searchable Register
Visit site: ipsewa.com · custom software development in Nepal
The Problem
Nepal publishes its trademark register only as PDF bulletins — 121 issues spanning 2006 to 2026, three of them image-only scans with no searchable text layer at all. To check whether a brand name was already taken, a business had to download and read all 121.
Almost nobody does. So they file blind and discover the conflict months later, in a first-to-file country where the earlier application wins regardless of who used the name first. The cost of that is a rebrand, or a dispute.
What We Built
One searchable register covering the whole archive: 70,608 published trademarks, 47,360 logos and 27,841 applicants from 100 countries. Search is free and needs no account, because a conflict check that costs money or a signup is a conflict check nobody runs.
From the same platform, businesses, entrepreneurs and IP practitioners then file and track trademark, patent and industrial-design applications with the Department of Industry — search and filing in one place rather than a lookup tool bolted beside a paper process.
The Decision That Shaped It
Every entry is displayed beside the exact row cropped from the original bulletin page. A user verifies against the primary source instead of trusting our transcription.
That was the hard requirement rather than a nice touch. Extracting 70,000 rows from twenty years of inconsistent PDF layouts — three of them scans — cannot be done without transcription error, and on a first-to-file register a wrong reading is worse than no reading: it tells someone their name is clear when it is not. Showing the source image makes the data checkable, so the platform is useful even where the extraction is imperfect.
What It Does For Users
- Free conflict search across the full 2006–2026 archive, in seconds instead of 121 downloads
- Every result verifiable against the cropped original bulletin row
- Filing for trademarks, patents and industrial designs with the Department of Industry
- Application tracking with a status timeline, and email at each stage
- Renewal and deadline reminders, so a registered mark is not lost to a missed date
- Supporting tools: conflict checker, NICE class finder and brand-strength scoring