Category: Trademarks

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Should the listserv member click on the link? Is it spearphishing?

Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC (“OPLF”) sponsors many listservs (email discussion groups for intellectual property professionals, here is a list of them), some with over a thousand members.   In recent days, hundreds of members of the listservs have started to receive email messages that prompted questions, such as:

I received an email, and I need to know whether it is a phishing hack.  If it’s legitimate, I will respond accordingly.

Another listserv member responded:

Got same thing yesterday.  Is real.  The question is why.

What do these emails mean?  Why are the listserv members receiving the emails?  How should listserv members respond?  In this blog posting, I try to answer these questions.  Continue reading “Should the listserv member click on the link? Is it spearphishing?”

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Listservs seem to be back in service

Hello listserv colleagues!  I think the listservs are more or less back in service.  But for about 30% of our listserv members, the member’s email service provider (ESP) is blocking our postings as spam.  If you are in that 30%, I urge you to direct your ESP to stop the blocking.  This may include whitelisting the new IP address or speaking frankly with your ESP.

And if you posted anything to any of the listservs since about December 21, I am sorry to say you will probably need to repost it.

It took a lot of my professional time to deal with this.  And the hosting service will cost a bit more in perpetuity.  I will gladly receive donations to help support this, as detailed below.

Details follow.  Continue reading “Listservs seem to be back in service”

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Learning to guess outcomes of appeals of 2d refusals

the TTABlog - keeping tabs on the TTABThanks to John L. Welch’s hundreds of blog articles about 2d refusals, I have gotten to the point where sometimes I can guess correctly the outcome of an ex parte appeal of a 2d refusal.  The alert reader might ask:

    • What is a “2d refusal”?
    • Why would it be interesting to try to guess “the outcome of an ex parte appeal of a 2d refusal”?
    • How might it be that hundreds of blog articles by John L. Welch might lead to a situation in which sometimes I can guess the outcome of such an appeal?
    • And, what can be said of John L. Welch’s extraordinary contributions to the trademark community through his blog?  Continue reading “Learning to guess outcomes of appeals of 2d refusals”
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Why all trademark practitioners need to know about BIMI

BIMI logoDo you or your trademark client ever find that your outbound email to somebody ends up in their spam folder?  Do you or your trademark client ever find that your outbound email to a recipient gets wrongly bounced as “suspected spam” or gets silently discarded by the recipient’s email service provider?

There’s a chance that BIMI, which draws upon a registered trademark of the sender of an email message, might help a little with these problems.  What is BIMI?  What must an email sender do to get BIMI to work?

Continue reading “Why all trademark practitioners need to know about BIMI”

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Reduction In Force at the USPTO

An article just now in The Guardian says:

In a memo seen by the Guardian, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced a “reduction in force” (RIF) program of layoffs at the agency on Wednesday, the first reported agency to do so.

“Approximately one percent of the USPTO workforce will be affected by this RIF,” wrote Valencia Martin Wallace, acting commissioner for the USPTO, wrote to employees at the agency. The USPTO did not respond to a request for comment

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USPTO blinks on shutdown of familiar assignment searches

August 27, 2025 announcement
click to enlarge

(Update:  every USPTO system relating to assignments is now broken on October 16, 2025, see blog article.)

On August 27, 2025, the USPTO said (quoted at right) that Saturday, September 27, 2025 was the day that the USPTO would shut down the two familiar assignment search systems, forcing users over to a new assignment search function in Assignment Center.

It appears the USPTO has blinked and will postpone this shutdown for about three weeks, until Monday, October 20, 2025.  Continue reading “USPTO blinks on shutdown of familiar assignment searches”