Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Yesterday I sent a US trademark application to a client to review and e-sign. Today came the email from Trademark Center telling me the client had e-signed it. I was invited to click to pay the money. So I clicked to pay the money.
For more than half an hour from now, I have been watching this screen that says “Please wait … Processing …”. And the word “Processing” is in an animated GIF that signals that something is happening. Continue reading “USPTO’s Trademark Center frozen”
It looks like an attorney in Florida hopes to get exclusive rights to have red hair with pink tinsel, as trade dress for attorney services. No, I am not making this up. Continue reading “The mark consists of the trade dress of the specific combination of red hair and sparkly pink hair tinsel”
It is my honor to post:
You can see them here.
I find it interesting that nowadays, a lot of my blog traffic comes from Reddit. Continue reading “Where my blog traffic comes from?”
For more than thirty years I have sponsored The Listservs. Each listserv is an email discussion group. I have sponsored listservs for patent practitioners, for trademark practitioners, and for industrial design protection practitioners. I have sponsored listservs for users of the Patent Cooperation Treaty and for users of Patent Center. And today, Google cut off 48 members of the e-Trademarks listserv.
What is Google doing wrong and what can be done about it? Continue reading “Today, Google cut off another 48 members of the e-Trademarks listserv”
When I was first in practice, a long time ago, the only ways to communicate with a patent examiner at the USPTO were:
The USPTO’s policy, to the extent that such a thing had been thought about at all, was that all of these kinds of communication were sufficiently secure as to satisfy national security requirements. You might file a patent application the contents of which were so sensitive that a foreign filing licence would not be granted, and it was okay that the way you sent it to the USPTO was by postal service.
But what kinds of communication are actually secure? As I discuss below, the USPTO has this kind of thing absolutely backwards. What USPTO thinks is secure is not secure, and vice versa. Continue reading “What kinds of USPTO communications are secure and not secure?”
As any experienced trademark practitioner will tell you, it is a big mistake to use a trademark as a noun. Using a trademark as a noun (e.g., “Pass me a Kleenex”) instead of an adjective (e.g., “Pass me a Kleenex tissue”) risks transforming a brand name into a generic term, potentially leading to a loss of legal protection. I have contacted Trezor Company s.r.o. (the maker of the cryptocurrency wallet shown at right) to suggest that they stop making this mistake. Let’s see if, some time soon, they update their firmware and apps and web site accordingly. Continue reading “Using a trademark as a noun”
Hello readers. It is now 2026 and this means it is time to get in your numbers for the 2025 toteboards:
The goal is to recognize and rank law firms in the US based upon the numbers of US design patents, US utility patents, US plant patents, and US trademark registrations each firm obtained for clients in 2025.
The questionnaires will close on Friday, February 13, 2026.
Here is a page suggesting how you might obtain these numbers.
Every year after I post the results of the toteboards, I get sad emails from firms that want me to accept their numbers late. This would, of course, typically result in kicking other firms down in the rankings — other firms that got their numbers in on time. Please help to reduce the number of such sad emails that I will receive this year. Maybe you are a person at your firm who is responsible for getting these numbers in. If so, please get your numbers in! Otherwise, please forward this blog posting to somebody at your firm to make sure that somebody at your firm gets the numbers in for your firm.
You can see the previous toteboards here, going back to the earliest toteboard in 2012.
The USPTO has issued a show-cause order dated January 27, 2026 which you can see here. The order has an Exhibit A listing 3361 trademark applications. The order sets a thirty-day period (ending on February 26, 2026) in which an applicant in any one of the applications will be permitted to attempt to show cause why the application ought not to be brought to an end. (Most of the listed applications have a status of “registered”, in which case the action taken by the USPTO will be to strike the registration from the Register.)
In recent days, our email server for our listservs may have removed your email address from membership in one or another of the listservs. Assuming that you did not want this, what should you do? Continue reading “What to do if your email service provider has been bouncing our listserv postings”