USPTO stops publishing IP addresses of trademark customers

USPTO did a good thing recently.

About a year and a half ago, I pointed out (see blog post) that the USPTO was publishing the IP addresses of trademark customers.  This was a Very Bad Thing.  I am delighted to be able to report that USPTO has taken corrective action.

As I pointed out in that August 14, 2014 blog post:

In an aspect of breathtakingly stupid system design, USPTO designed TEAS so that the IP address of the filer is posted as a matter of public record in the TSDR records. …

USPTO should never have done this publishing of IP addresses of USPTO customers in a way that links the IP address to a particular customer.  It should stop now, and it should go back and redact the IP addresses from existing public records in TSDR.

Here, quoted from that blog post, is the sort of publishing that the USPTO was doing.  As you can see from this excerpt from a trademark application, in this particular case the filer was at IP address 216.239.45.92.

ip-address-tsdr

 

About two weeks ago, USPTO changed TSDR so that it no longer publishes the IP address.  Here is how this excerpt looks now:

ip-addAs you can see, the IP address has been redacted from the TSDR document.  The only thing that you can discern now from the TSDR document is that the first and second octets are three digits each (“XXX”), and that the third and fourth octets are two digits each (“XX”).

One wishes the USPTO could have acted a little bit faster than taking a year and a half.  But still it is welcome news that the USPTO has taken this corrective step.

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