(Update: the 6001 customers did eventually get their registration numbers back two weeks later, on May 24, 2022. See blog article.)
(USPTO published an explanation of sorts. Blog article.)
Orwell’s 1984 imagines a dystopian future with a “memory hole”, which Wikipedia defines as
any mechanism for the deliberate alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.
The morning of Tuesday, May 10, 2022 seemed like an ordinary Tuesday morning for trademark practitioners in the US. Just like any other Tuesday, about six thousand US trademarks got registered. But by Tuesday afternoon it became clear that this was no ordinary Tuesday. By today (Friday the 13th), we see that the Trademark Office has gone down the memory hole, and has “disappeared” six thousand and one US trademark registrations. Continue reading “Trademark Office goes down the memory hole”
