TMEP¶

Access the Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure (TMEP) for searching and retrieving trademark examination guidance.

First-time setup¶

TmepClient reads from a local SQLite/FTS5 corpus, not live USPTO. The wheel ships the builder; build the snapshot once before the first call:

patent-client-agents-build-tmep-corpus \
    --output ~/.cache/patent_client_agents/tmep.db

The crawl takes ~2 minutes and produces ~1,750 sections across all 19 TMEP chapters (~16MB). Re-run periodically to pick up USPTO revisions.

The runtime locates the corpus via:

TMEP_CORPUS_PATH env var (explicit; used in cloud deploys).
~/.cache/patent_client_agents/tmep.db (local-dev default).

If neither exists, the first call raises CorpusUnavailable with the build command in the message — no silent fallback to live HTTP.

Quick Start¶

from patent_client_agents.tmep import TmepClient

async with TmepClient() as client:
    # Search the TMEP
    results = await client.search("likelihood of confusion")

    # Get a specific section
    section = await client.get_section("1207.01(a)")

    # List available versions (single-entry; reflects the loaded snapshot)
    versions = await client.list_versions()

Functions¶

Function	Description
`search()`	Full-text search across the TMEP (FTS5 BM25 by default)
`get_section()`	Get a specific TMEP section by number or href
`list_versions()`	Return the loaded snapshot's version label

Common Sections¶

Section	Topic
1202	Use of subject matter as a trademark
1207	Refusal on the basis of likelihood of confusion (§ 2(d))
1209	Refusal on basis of descriptiveness
1212	Acquired distinctiveness (§ 2(f))
1213	Disclaimers
1402	Identification and classification of goods/services
1715	Letter of protest
904	Specimens

Usage Pattern¶

from patent_client_agents.tmep import (
    TmepClient,
    SearchInput,
    search,
    get_section,
)

# Context manager (recommended)
async with TmepClient() as client:
    results = await client.search("disclaimer")

# One-shot convenience functions
results = await search(SearchInput(query="2(d) refusal"))
section = await get_section("1207.01(a)")

Cloud deploys¶

For containerized deployments, run the builder during image build and set TMEP_CORPUS_PATH in the runtime env:

RUN patent-client-agents-build-tmep-corpus --output /app/data/tmep.db
ENV TMEP_CORPUS_PATH=/app/data/tmep.db

The published wheel stays small (no corpus bundled); refresh becomes "rebuild + redeploy".