Flood of trademark applications from China alarms US officials

Having a trademark registered in the US is crucial for sellers on Amazon, whose brand-registry program rewards officially trademarked products with more site visibility and a higher listing in search

Huge numbers of Chinese citizens are seeking trademarks in the US, flooding the US Patent and Trademark Office with applications that officials say appear to be rife with false information.

The surge of filings from China has surprised the patent office. Officials say it could be fuelled by cash subsidies that Chinese municipal governments are offering to citizens who register a trademark in a foreign country. Trademark applications from China have grown more than 12-fold since 2013 and for fiscal 2017 totalled thousands more than the combined filings from Canada, Germany and the UK About one in every nine trademark