Category: Trademarks

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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”

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USPTO’s Trademark Center is broken for logo applications

January 18, 2025 was the day that the USPTO shut down TEAS for the filing of new US trademark applications.  Starting that day, the only way to file a US trademark application has been Trademark Center.

And now, as of a couple of days ago, Trademark Center has been broken for trademark applications in which the mark is a logo (rather than standard characters).  The practitioner prepares the application and sends it to the client for review and possible e-signature.   The client clicks on the link to review the application, and within seconds, Trademark Center jumps abruptly to its main page.  It is impossible for the client to review or e-sign the application.

This was first reported two days ago by an alert trademark practitioner in the E-Trademarks Listerv, which is a community of over a thousand trademark practitioners.