Category: Trademarks

Today, May 24, 2022, the Commissioner for Trademarks published my client’s secret email address to the world.   It is not easy to find polite language to describe how I am feeling right now.  This is a part of the Trademark Office’s ham-fisted migration from paper registration certificates to electronic registration certificates.  I am very disappointed.  Continue reading “Trademark Office breaks its promise to keep applicant email address secret”

Today was the big day for the Trademark Office to make up for lost time.  It issued 6001 paper registrations on May 10, then memory-holed them.  Then there were around 7000 paper registrations that ought to have been issued on May 17, and that did not happen.  Finally today the Trademark Office issued 20838 US trademark registrations.  That was about seven hours ago.   The registration numbers that got handed out on May 10 were in the range from 6720667 to 6726667.  Those were supposed to become paper registration certificates but that never actually happened.  (They got memory-holed.)  Those registration numbers got handed out again today.  In addition, another 14838 registration numbers got handed out today, which were the make-ups from May 17 as well as the registrations that would normally have gotten issued today.   The highest registration number that got handed out today is 6741504.

But what did not happen was the actual electronic trademark registration certificates.

Just now, at around 7 AM Eastern Time, the Trademark Office has uploaded the actual electronic trademark registration certificates to TSDR.  So now it is actually possible for these 20838 customers of the USPTO to download the actual electronic trademark registration certificates.

You can click here to see the lowest-numbered US trademark registration certificate that the Trademark Office registered today (6720667).  You can click here to see the highest-numbered US trademark registration certificate that the Trademark Office registered today (6741504).  

It is interesting to note that they are all digitally signed on May 19, 2022 (five days ago) or May 20, 2022 (four days ago).  So the certificates were actually created four or five days ago.  

Two hours ago, the 6001 documents dated May 11, 2022 that served the purpose of memory-holing the Trademark Office’s registration activities of May 10, 2022 (seen at right) had themselves gone down the memory hole (blog article).  

Now they are back.

 

The USPTO registered about three times as many trademarks today as it would on a usual Tuesday, as may be seen at right.  This is a consequence of the “down the memory hole” activity of the Trademark Office on May 10, 2022 (blog article and blog article and blog article).  Continue reading “A big registration day at the Trademark Office”

(Updated, see below, to report events at the Trademark Office on May 24, 2022.  Yes I correctly predicted several aspects of what eventually did happen on May 24, 2022, as seen in the updates below.)

Well, folks, the USPTO has sort of vaguely and indirectly half-answered what happened last week with the 6001 US trademark registration numbers that were communicated to applicants and then got sent down the memory hole (blog article and blog article).  The explanation, such as it is, is that there was “a recent paper vendor disruption”.  Continue reading “Trademark Office memory hole activity explained”

In a previous blog article, I described that the Trademark Office has tried to flush down the memory hole all traces of the 6001 US trademark registration numbers that it communicated to its customers on May 10, 2022.  And indeed right now, the registration numbers themselves, and the registration date, have gotten scrubbed out from where they were previously stored in TSDR and in TESS.

But the Trademark Office slipped up.  As of today, the XML data that it provides for those 6001 trademark applications continues to report a “status code” of 700, which means “registered”, and a “status text” of “REGISTERED”, which of course means registered.

To do a thorough job of scrubbing away evidence of its big mistake of May 10, the Trademark Office would also need to restore the “status code” to whatever it was before May 10.

I have loaded the 6001 cases into my IP Badger.  If and when the USPTO manages to scrub the “status code 700” information, I will see it.

(Update:  the 6001 customers did eventually get their registration numbers back two weeks later, on May 24, 2022.  See blog article.)

(USPTO published an explanation of sorts.  Blog article.)

Orwell’s 1984 imagines a dystopian future with a “memory hole”, which Wikipedia defines as

any mechanism for the deliberate alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.

The morning of Tuesday, May 10, 2022 seemed like an ordinary Tuesday morning for trademark practitioners in the US.  Just like any other Tuesday, about six thousand US trademarks got registered.  But by Tuesday afternoon it became clear that this was no ordinary Tuesday.  By today (Friday the 13th), we see that the Trademark Office has gone down the memory hole, and has “disappeared” six thousand and one US trademark registrations.  Continue reading “Trademark Office goes down the memory hole”

The tenth e-Trademarks listserv reception took place as scheduled on Tuesday, May 3 in Washington, DC.   Listserv member Matt Curran has shared a couple of photographs that he took during the reception.  Continue reading “A successful tenth e-Trademarks listserv reception!”