Category: Trademarks

Seems to me that the Trademark Office people at the USPTO ought to have put software safeguards in place so that the Trademark Office could handle its own characters. The Trademark Office has not put such safeguards into place. Continue reading “Trademark Office can’t handle its own characters”

The executive summary is that the USPTO developers of Trademark Center made a big mistake in the coding of the priority claims in a trademark application — they failed to provide EUIPO and Benelux as trademark offices in which a priority application might have been filed.  In doing so, they failed to learn from the identical mistake that had been made by the USPTO developers of Patent Center, who had failed to provide EPO and OAPI and ARIPO and EAPO as patent offices in which a priority application might have been filed.  Continue reading “EUIPO and Benelux are missing from Trademark Center”

I am delighted to be able to report that the eleventh annual e-Trademarks reception went very well.  I think it was a complete success.  You can see a very nice group photo taken by listserv member Doug Isenberg, quoted at right.  Click to enlarge it.  You will see 48 attendees in the photo, taken toward the end of the evening.  Over the course of the event, some eighty attendees visited.  Celebrity attendees included Debbie Roenning, director of the Madrid Legal Division of the World Intellectual Property Organization, David Gooder, Commissioner for Trademarks of the USPTO, and Derrick Brent, Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Deputy Director of the USPTO.

(Update:  Namecheap has restored the function of the e-Trademarks listserv.   It took 56 hours and 24 emails back and forth, but yes the function of the listserv has been restored.)

Hello folks.  The e-Trademarks listserv has been broken for about 36 hours now.   What triggered this was that on May 1, 2024 the listserv system did what it always does on the first day of every month — it sends out monthly membership reminders.  In the case of the e-Trademarks listserv this was about 1227 email messages with nearly identical subject lines and very similar email body texts.  Our hosting service provider (Namecheap) then compared this number (1227) with the stated limit (for our type of hosting) which is ten thousand email messages per hour, and somehow wrongly concluded that we sent so many emails that it supposedly violated the stated limit.  And Namecheap imposed a shutdown on the e-Trademarks listserv.

Yes, I know, if a person carries out complicated math, a person can eventually arrive at a conclusion that the number 1227 is actually smaller than 10000 and not larger than 10000.  And I have tried to explain this to the “legal and abuse” department at Namecheap and I have thus far apparently failed to make myself clear to them on this seemingly subtle point.

This is not the first time that Namecheap has wrongly tagged our listserv traffic as supposedly being spam.  Yes, what happens often is that hundreds or a thousand emails get sent at the same time, with identical subject lines.  But that is exactly what a listserv is supposed to do!  If the listserv were to fail to send hundreds or a thousand emails get sent at the same time, with identical subject lines, that would mean the listserv is failing at its stated function.  I have gone through this bad movie with Namecheap several times, including the following:

• • May 1, 2024, case number PRB-650-91372
  • February 21, 2024, case number JET-420-91825
  • November 6, 2023, case number LZW-313-84957
  • January 9, 2023, case number KHX-716-74404

In the previous three cases, what eventually happened was Namecheap realizing that they were wrong to shut down the listserv and then they corrected their mistake.  Now we have this most recent case and again I guess it will be a matter of time before Namecheap corrects its mistake.

Okay, I have vented.  Thank you, readers, for listening.

Some time, hopefully soon, the Namecheap people will follow along with my explanation that 1227 is smaller than 10000 instead of larger.  And they will restore the e-trademarks listserv to service.

About thirteen hours ago I posted a blog article noting that the Trademark Office made lots of mistakes when it issued six thousand trademark registrations yesterday.  In that blog article, I wrote:

I imagine this blog article will eventually prompt the Trademark Office to correct its databases for the six thousand registrations that issued yesterday.  I wonder how many days that will take.

The blog article also got cited in the e-Trademarks listserv.

We now have our answer.  It took about thirteen hours.  Just now, corrected Notices of Registration have arrived and they actually cite the registration number instead the way it was before, with a gap in the text where the registration number should be.  Previously the registration number was missing from TSDR but as of now, the Trademark Office has updated TSDR to cite the registration number.  Previously, the “maintenance” tab was missing but now it is there.

For those keeping score at home, no, nobody at the Trademark Office has gotten in touch to thank me for pointing out this problem.

(Update:  the USPTO fixed its mistakes — see blog article.)

Yesterday (Tuesday, April 9, 2024) was registration day for two of my trademark applications.  I know this because, among other things, I am in possession of the official Certificates of Registration, which the USPTO cryptographically signed on March 24, 2024.  Which means that the USPTO has known the registration numbers since at least as long ago as March 24 (more than two weeks ago).  But the USPTO trademark databases are broken.  Continue reading “USPTO trademark databases broken”