§ Trust · audit posture
Transparent. Audited. Falling toward zero.
The audit-log, SOC 2, and customer-impact-rate story page. This is the customer-facing summary of how Etymolt earns a clearance signal: which public registers we consult, how often we refresh them, how we audit the verdicts we ship, what recourse exists when we are wrong, and where we stand on the controls attestation that proves the rest. Refreshed quarterly per R12 D-R12-24.
Last updated · 2026-05-19 · /methodology · /coverage · /research/regressions
§1 · The Bureau Model
The legal posture, stated plainly
Etymolt is a reporting bureau for naming records — like a credit bureau for brands. We tell you what the registries of record show as of the query timestamp. We don't issue legal opinions; we give your counsel something to read first.
Etymolt operates under the Bureau Model — the same legal posture Wevorce, LegalZoom, and Rocket Lawyer use to ship self-help legal-tech without practicing law. We prepare evidentiary work product (verdict, jurisdictions consulted, citations, audit log). The customer remains the filer of record before the USPTO. Sarah Chen (GC) §2.1 is the canonical source memo.
What this means in practice: this page is not legal advice, and Etymolt is not a substitute for a clearance opinion by a licensed trademark attorney. Before filing a federal trademark application, before launching a brand to market, or before committing material spend to a name, consult counsel. The Bureau Model footer at the bottom of this page is the canonical verbatim restatement.
Etymolt is a screening signal, not legal advice. We are not a law firm and no attorney-client relationship is formed by your use of this service. Do not adopt a name in commerce without counsel review of your specific goods and services. Consult a licensed trademark attorney before adopting a name in commerce.
§2 · Claim boundaries · R12 D-R12-1
What we claim. What we do not.
Per R12 D-R12-1 framing, the external claim is transparent, audited, falling toward zero. The two columns below are the operational form of that framing — the explicit list of what is in scope and what is not. The cardinal rule (R13 D-R13-1) extends the discipline jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction on /coverage.
We do claim
In scope
- Verdict signaling across three named tags (PROCEED / STRATEGIC / ABANDON) with
status: partialnoted, plus explicit reason codes per R13 D-R13-8. - Five-axis verification — trademark, domain & handle, cultural screen, sound symbolism (advisory), pronunciation resilience (advisory) — per the published methodology paper.
- Audit-receipt arrays on every response:
jurisdictions_consulted,tlds_consulted,platforms_consulted,cultural_sources_consulted— per R13 D-R13-9. - Cardinal-rule discipline (R13 D-R13-1): each claimed jurisdiction is COVERED with a published Coverage Spec, PARTIAL with disclosed caveat, or NOT_CHECKED — never silently mis-claimed.
- Append-only provable-replay audit log (R12 D-R12-13) with Ed25519 signing (R12 D-R12-14) — any party can independently verify a verdict has not been modified since issue.
We do NOT claim
Out of scope
- We are not your lawyer. A verdict is a computational signal from public registry data plus proprietary heuristics, not a clearance opinion from licensed counsel.
- We do not reduce trademark-collision risk to a single number that holds across every filing class, every jurisdiction, and every future enforcement decision.
- We miss things. The cardinal-rule iteration loop (R12 D-R12-10) exists because every public registry has a freshness window, every heuristic has an error rate, and every confirmed mistake ships as a regression-test fixture in /research/regressions.
- Sound symbolism and pronunciation-resilience axes ship at ADVISORY tier per R12 D-R12-7 — they are inputs to your creative judgment, not verdict-grade evidence.
- Cultural-axis sub-tiers (R15 RED-3): 14 languages COVERED-with-caveat, 14 ADVISORY, 9 NOT_CHECKED. Native-speaker review is recommended for any market launch beyond the COVERED-with-caveat tier.
- Domain axis (R15 RED-2): 8 TLDs surface at ADVISORY via authoritative RDAP. Registry-set premium pricing, ICANN reserved-name guards, and aftermarket-listing detection are NOT_CHECKED at launch.
Customer-impact error rate · 90-day rolling
Per R12 D-R12-24, we publish two error metrics: the per-axis verdict-error rate (engineering metric, measured against the versioned ground-truth corpus on /research/benchmark) and the customer-impact error rate (business metric, computed from a rolling 90-day window of post-verdict customer surveys). The customer-impact rate is the headline figure on this page; it updates quarterly.
Methodology: /methodology — measurement methodology, survey instrument, ground-truth corpus version, and the dual-metric reconciliation. When a confirmed mistake is identified — via internal QC, adversarial probe, or customer report — the correction-notice protocol (R12 D-R12-20) fires: every customer whose verdict could have been affected by the underlying defect is proactively notified with the new finding and the methodology change.
SOC 2 progress tracker
Per R12 D-R12-17, the SOC 2 timeline is two phases: Type I (point-in-time controls attestation) targeting Q3 2026, and Type II (operating-effectiveness attestation) over a minimum six-month observation window, targeting Q1 2027. The controls inventory lands first; the auditor engagement letter follows; the report ships on this page when the observation window closes.
Controls inventory covers source-freshness logging, sample-based QC (1% daily re-run through an independent path), regression-test discipline, public benchmark cadence, disclaimer surfacing, and cryptographic verdict signing.
Point-in-time controls attestation. Auditor engagement letter target 2026-07-01; auditor name and the controls inventory publish here once signed.
Operating-effectiveness attestation over a minimum six-month observation window. Executive summary (or full report) ships on this page when the window closes.
Audit log · provable replay
Per R12 D-R12-13, every verdict is committed to a provable-replay audit log — append-only Postgres with Merkle-chained hashes. The log is cryptographically tamper-evident: any retroactive modification of a historical verdict would invalidate the chain and be detectable by any party holding a later receipt. We cannot modify a verdict in place; when methodology iterates and a previously-issued verdict would resolve differently under the new methodology, we publish the change in /research/regressions and flag the affected verdicts for opt-in re-run.
Per R12 D-R12-14, every API response carries a verdict_id and an Ed25519 signature over the verdict body. The public key is published at /.well-known/etymolt-pubkey; any party can independently verify a verdict was issued by Etymolt and has not been modified since.
Per R14 D-R14-30, the audit log records source license, redistribution-permitted flag, corpus version, and methodology version under which each verdict was issued — the substrate for EU AI Act Article 12 record-keeping. Customers who hold a verdict_id can request the full receipt JSON; email audit@etymolt.com — receipts return within five business days.
The iteration loop
Full log /research/regressions →Monthly publication cadence per R12 D-R12-21. Each entry ships with the regression-test fixture so the next release cannot re-ship the same defect. Sarah (GC) pre-publication review is mandatory.
- RG-2026-0032026-04-22· Trademark · USPTO
TSDR live-lookup fallback omitted opposition history for marks in active TTAB proceedings. Corrected; regression-test fixture added.
- RG-2026-0022026-03-14· Cultural · sound symbolism
Phonotactic-anomaly weight overweighted Hindi-cluster onset penalty for English-source names. Corpus recalibrated; affected verdicts re-flagged.
- RG-2026-0012026-02-08· Domain · handle availability
Instagram handle-resolver returned stale 404 for handles freed within the prior 7 days. Cache TTL reduced to 24h; correction notices issued.
Sources referenced
Every public register we consult, the tier under which we claim it, the refresh cadence, and the honest disclosure of what is NOT covered. Where a source is marked NOT_CHECKED, we are honest about not consulting it — per the R13 cardinal rule, partial data is worse than no data. Full per-jurisdiction detail (row counts, license, wave/ETA, methodology version) lives at /coverage.
| Source | Tier | Refresh | Honest disclosure |
|---|---|---|---|
| USPTO bulk (United States) | PARTIAL | Daily delta + weekly full bulk | Ingest toward ≥14M-row target; ≥3.5M live-row floor met. Daily delta cron wiring completes alongside the full-corpus gate (target 2026-06-01). |
| USPTO TTAB precedent | PARTIAL | Weekly cron (16-day delta lag in active close) | 16-day lag pending cron resume (R13 D-R13-7, target 2026-05-30). Decisions filed after the last refresh track via the TSDR live lookup. |
| UKIPO domestic (United Kingdom) | COVERED | Weekly bulk | Domestic-only. UK-designated WIPO Madrid IRs track via the WIPO Madrid IR mirror. |
| IPAS Australia | COVERED | Weekly bulk + delta | Full domestic corpus indexed (2.21M rows). Madrid Protocol designations naming Australia track via the WIPO Madrid IR mirror. |
| WIPO Madrid IR | PARTIAL | Daily FTP delta | 156K of ~1.6M Madrid IRs indexed across 124 designated countries. Full Madrid bulk deferred to R14 (Q3 2026 review) per R13 D-R13-16. |
| Famous-marks denylist | COVERED | On-demand (PR-merge updates) | Hand-curated by legal. Covers marks the famous-mark doctrine protects outside a class-specific filing. |
| EUIPO (European Union) | NOT_CHECKED | Live-API + cache (Wave 1 Q2 2026) | Infrastructure ~70% built; operator account + bulk-URL resolution pending. Wave 1 Q2 2026 launches the live-API path. |
| Canada CIPO · New Zealand IPONZ · IP India | NOT_CHECKED | Waves 1–2 (2026) | Wave 1 Q2 2026 (CIPO, IPONZ); Wave 2 Q3 2026 (IP India, post-approval). The /coverage table carries per-jurisdiction status. |
| DPMA · INPI-FR · JPO · KIPO · CNIPA · LatAm | NOT_CHECKED | R14 expansion (2027) | Q1–Q2 2027 sequenced rollout per R13 D-R13-17. Non-Latin-script handling is a research dependency for JP/CN. LatAm registries deferred per R13 amendment 2026-05-19. |
§8 · Cardinal rule reaffirmation · R13 D-R13-1
Partial data is worse than no data
The cardinal rule (R13 D-R13-1) governs the public surface: every claimed jurisdiction is COVERED with a published Coverage Spec, PARTIAL with disclosed caveat, or NOT_CHECKED. Never silently mis-claimed. Promotion to COVERED requires the 5-condition gate (R13 D-R13-10); automatic demotion fires when a source health-check fails for more than 7 days. The honest-tier discipline is published on /coverage and the per-axis advisory disclosures (Domain ADVISORY per R15 RED-2, Cultural 3-tier per R15 RED-3) extend the rule to the non-trademark axes.
Per R16 D-R16-2, R12 + R13 + R14 + R15 binding decisions remain LOCKED — R16 extends, never overrides. The non-negotiables are the Bureau Model verbatim (R12 D-R12-2), the D-R12-1 framing, and the cardinal rule per jurisdiction. R17 (advisor doc review, 2026-05-20) reaffirmed the same: the binding decisions cannot be softened.
── Named feature ──
Opt-in customer re-run
When a coverage refresh closes a gap (e.g. the USPTO full-corpus gate-pass scheduled 2026-06-01), or when an entry on /research/regressions retroactively affects a verdict you previously held, your existing /v/[id] verdicts can be re-run under the current methodology and the current registry snapshot. The re-run produces a new verdict_id linked-from the original. You see both. The audit log records the link. Free for the lifetime of an active subscription.
Combined with the correction-notice protocol (R12 D-R12-20), the re-run operationalizes the bureau-model dispute surface: a customer who believes a verdict is wrong has a documented path to dispute and a re-run mechanism that produces a new audit-logged decision — we do not silently rewrite the historical record.
Request a re-run
POST your existing verdict_id to POST /v1/verify/{id}/rerun, or email support with the verdict_id and reason.
Methodology
The full five-axis methodology — trademark, domain & handle, cultural screen across 20 markets, sound symbolism, pronunciation resilience — is published openly. Recalibration runs weekly against a versioned ground-truth corpus per R12 D-R12-25; the corpus version ships with every verdict in measurement_methodology per R12 D-R12-19.
- /methodology — authored five-axis methodology paper with citations and the full disclaimer. The single source of truth for how a verdict is computed.
- /research/benchmark — per-axis accuracy with confidence intervals, quarterly publish cadence per R12 D-R12-18.
- /coverage — per-jurisdiction status (COVERED / PARTIAL / NOT_CHECKED) with row counts, refresh cadence, license, and versioned Coverage Spec JSON.
Cite this page
Etymolt (2026). Trust — audit log, SOC 2, customer-impact rate. https://www.etymolt.com/trust (published 2026-05-19; last modified 2026-05-19).
Source-of-truth memos: R12 board memo (2026-05-18) — D-R12 hallucination-framing deliberation; R13 board memo (2026-05-19) — D-R13 tm-completeness; R14 board memo (2026-05-19) — D-R14 data-leverage.