The TIPO API for trademark search

The Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO, 經濟部智慧財產局) is the Taiwanese national authority responsible for examining and registering trademarks, patents, designs, and integrated-circuit layouts. Headquartered in Taipei and operating under the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), TIPO administers the Taiwan Trademark Act and maintains the national register. Taiwan received 97,411 trademark applications in 2025 — the highest annual volume since TIPO's founding in 1999, up 8% year over year — putting the office consistently among the top ten national trademark filers in the Asia-Pacific. The register is dense by Taiwanese standards: a high-population, high-density tech economy with a long-standing manufacturing brand culture pushes the total estimated corpus to roughly 2.5 million records once historical filings, surviving registrations, and pending applications are counted together.

Taiwan's defining quirk for any developer integrating trademark data is that Taiwan is not a Madrid Protocol member — and not a Paris Convention signatory either. Unlike Japan, Korea, China, and almost every other major Asian economy, you cannot designate Taiwan through a single WIPO international application; every Taiwanese trademark must be filed directly at TIPO. Taiwan is a WTO member, so priority can be claimed from a prior application in any other WTO state, but the filing itself always happens at TIPO under domestic procedure. The practical consequence is that the Taiwan register is fully self-contained: there are no inbound Madrid designations to reconcile with the national-phase record, no IR cross-references in either direction. Owner names appear in Traditional Chinese (繁體中文) — Taiwan never adopted the simplified-character reform — frequently alongside Latin transliterations, and Japanese script appears on a meaningful share of filings reflecting Taiwan's deep Japan-facing business ties. Examination is in Traditional Chinese under the Trademark Act, with a three-month post-registration opposition window.

TIPO exposes the register through two main channels. TWTMSEARCH (the trademark search platform at cloud.tipo.gov.tw) is the free public web search, including a newer AI-assisted image-search system for figurative marks, and an English UI alongside Traditional Chinese. The TIPO Open Data service publishes machine-readable trademark feeds through tiponet.tipo.gov.tw — the canonical bulk surface for programmatic consumers — covering applications, registrations, and gazette events. Semiconductors and electronics are an outsized share of high-stakes Taiwanese trademark activity: TSMC has been Taiwan's top domestic patent applicant for nine consecutive years and maintains an active TIPO trademark portfolio, and the same is broadly true of the wider Taiwanese chip, foundry, and electronics manufacturing ecosystem. Signa is building its TIPO connector against the TWTMSEARCH and Open Data surfaces for Q3 2026; on launch it will normalize the Traditional-Chinese register, the Trademark Act event vocabulary, and the multi-script mark fields into the same unified schema used for USPTO, EUIPO, JPO, KIPO, and every other office.