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!”
(Updated to report that the nice people at WIPO received the poster. blog article.)
The e-Trademarks listserv reception took place as scheduled on Tuesday, May 3. About seventy people attended. I am delighted to report that two nice people from the Madrid Protocol part of WIPO attended the listserv. We greeted them with an 18 inch by 22 inch (46 cm by 56 cm) poster with a “wish list”. It was signed by about 41 of the listserv members. I will be mailing the poster to our WIPO colleagues. Here are the WIPO people and here is the “wish list”: Continue reading “Nice people from WIPO attended e-Trademarks listserv reception”
The Turkish Patent and Trademark Office has announced that it will join the WIPO DAS system, with effect from June 1, 2022. Turkey’s participation will be as a Depositing Office, and the participation will be with respect to every possible type of application, as will be discussed. Continue reading “Turkey joins the DAS system”
The Tenth Annual e-Trademarks Listserv Reception will take place on Tuesday, May 3, 2022 (7PM to 9PM) in Washington, DC at the time of the INTA annual meeting. Your host is yours truly. For more information, or to RSVP, click here.
One of the dumbest things that you can do when you are naming your intellectual property firm, it turns out, is picking a name that is more than 35 characters in length. If you make this mistake, it means you often can’t get paid.
A related dumb thing is arranging to have a street address that exceeds 35 characters in length. This, too, might mean that you can’t get paid.
It turns out that there is a simple and quick fix for this problem, as I will mention at the end of this blog article.
Yesterday the USPTO posted a very odd notice telling all of its customers who use Time-base One-Time Password apps for two-factor authentication that between now and May 1, 2022, they need to discard their existing Secret Code Number and get a new Secret Code Number. As I blogged yesterday (blog article) the notice is strikingly close to being content-free, explaining almost nothing about what it is trying to say. Alert reader Gerry Peters posted a comment to my blog article that made me realize that not only was the USPTO notice nearly content-free, but it also used the word “mobile” in an extremely awkward way. Gerry pointed out that a succinct writer could simply have used the two-word phrase “authenticator app” throughout the USPTO notice, and that instead the writer went to the special point of inserting the word “mobile” no fewer than seven times into the notice, forming the three-word phrase “mobile authenticator app” all seven times.
Gerry pointed out that most users of USPTO systems like PAIR and EFS-Web and Patentcenter and TEAS (all of which require the use of two-factor authentication) almost certainly do not log in on a mobile phone but instead log in on a desktop or notebook computer. Gerry pointed out, correctly, that the everyday shorthand phrase that most people use as a substitute for the accurate but rather longer phrase “Time-base One-Time Password app” is simply the two-word phase “authenticator app”. Gerry wondered whether the seven-time insertion of “mobile” into the phrase was merely a sort of nervous tic, a completely unnecessary addition of a throwaway word, or whether the three-word phrase seemingly so carefully constructed and so consistently employed from the top to the bottom of the USPTO notice might have some significance. Maybe for example the need for users to go through this complicated process of discarding an existing Secret Code Number and getting a new Secret Code number is limited to that subset of users who use mobile devices for logging in at the USPTO?
Having read Gerry’s comment, and having given the matter quite a bit of thought, I conclude two things. Continue reading “Why the word “mobile” in that odd USPTO notice yesterday?”
