A Madrid Protocol thing that USPTO needs to do as Office of Origin

Hello, readers in the US.

You know those notifications that you receive from WIPO about your Madrid Protocol cases?  Those notifications from WIPO about your Madrid cases that do not tell you your attorney docket number?  

Don’t you wish that each such notice would tell you your attorney docket number?  Don’t you get very tired of having to go on a treasure hunt every time you receive such a Madrid notice from WIPO, to try to figure out what the attorney docket number is?

Maybe you wonder if there is some good reason why such notices do not tell you your attorney docket number.

There is a reason.  If you’d like to know, read on. 

For WIPO to provide your attorney docket number on a notice relating to a Madrid Protocol case, clearly one precondition would have to be that WIPO is aware of your attorney docket number.  

The only way that WIPO could possibly be aware of your attorney docket number is if the Office of Origin were to provide that attorney docket number to WIPO at the time that the Office of Origin certifies the international trademark application to the IB.

It turns out that the USPTO, in its role as Office of Origin for Madrid filings, fails to provide the attorney docket number to WIPO when it certifies an international trademark application to the IB.

It’s easy enough to see that the USPTO does not do this.  You can simply click through the “Application for International Registration” form in the TEASi system, and you will see that the form never asks you to provide any attorney docket number.  From this it is clear that the USPTO as OoO could not possibly provide such an attorney docket number to the IB.

In case you wondered, there are Offices of Origin that provide the attorney docket number to the IB.  These include Benelux, China, and Germany.

So here is the “ask”.  Could the USPTO, as OoO, please give the applicant an opportunity to enter an attorney docket number in the “Application for International Registration” form?  And could the USPTO then please forward that information to the IB as part of the certification process?