Category: Trademarks

Readers will recall my postings here and here and here about the Trademark Office’s recent Examination Guideline requiring trademark applicants to reveal to the public where they sleep at night.  

Within recent weeks (see my blog post of December 29, 2019) I have filed petitions in some of my cases asking that the applicant be permitted to withhold this information from the public for reasons of personal privacy and safety.

I was dismayed to hear in the e-Trademarks listserv from a practitioner who reports that he filed such a petition on September 13, 2019 in one of his cases, and he recently telephoned the Office of Trademark Petitions to ask the status of his petition.  He says he was told that there are many such petitions, and they are all “on hold”, and that we should not expect decisions on such petitions any time soon.

Have you had to deal with this?  Have you filed such a petition?  Was it granted?  Please post a comment below.

On November 18, 2019 I posted this blog article reporting the quite remarkable news that IP Australia had joined the DAS system for purposes of trademarks.  Even now in January 2020 no other Office is a member of DAS for purposes of trademarks.  In that blog article I proved to you that IP Australia must really be an Accessing Office for purposes of trademarks, and I did it by posting an actual Certificate of Availability from the DAS system, showing that US trademark application number 77087422 is available to IP Australia through the DAS system.  But more than a month has passed during which no trademark practitioner raised the following questions:

1. How did I obtain this Certificate of Availability?
2. If the USPTO is not a depositing Office for trademarks, then how is it that this US trademark application is available to IP Australia in DAS?  
3. To obtain this Certificate, I had to somehow get a DAS access code to plug into the DAS system. Where did I get this DAS access code, given that the USPTO does not provide DAS access codes for trademark applications?
4. And most importantly, how is it that no reader of this blog even caught on that these questions needed to be asked?

If you somehow figure out or already know the answers to questions 1-3, please post a comment below.  In doing so, you will gain recognition as a truly trendy, modern, and up-to-date trademark practitioner.  

Back on September 24th (blog article) a very high-up person in the Office of the Commissioner for Trademarks had telephoned me, promising me that Real Soon Now the Trademark Office would issue yet another Exam Guideline, doing the right thing about post office boxes.  Unfortunately that has not happened.  Trademark practitioners are starting to receive super-intrusive Office Actions demanding things like revealing the personal home addresses of clients.  What can be done about all of this? Continue reading “Trademark Office has not backed down yet on post office boxes”