Nineteenth anniversary of the TTABlog

I offer congratulations and thanks to John L. Welch, who has by now given nineteen years of service to the trademark community with the TTABlog.  This remarkable blog, to which you should subscribe if you have not already done so, has no equal in the trademark community.  This remarkable trademark practitioner, to whom you should drop a thank-you note, has no equal in the trademark community. 

Here is John’s law firm bio page, at which you can send an email to him..

For the handful of readers who somehow had not already come to know and depend upon John’s blog, I will try to describe the blog.

First, we note that his blog dates from the year 2004.  Yes, this means that John started blogging many years before it was trendy or fashionable to blog.  Look for example at the archives for my Ant-Like Persistence blog and you will see that I only started blogging a mere nine years ago.  A decade before that, John launched the TTABlog.

Second, John provides a search engine for his past postings that has saved me (and many readers) over and over again.   Suppose you are working on a trademark matter and you realize you need a case that says this or that, or you realize you need to find out if some particular issue has been written about by the TTAB.  You can do a search through the archives of the TTABlog.  I blogged about this on January 6, 2015 in my article Clever associate’s trademark advocacy secret weapon revealed.  The point of that article was that the clever associate’s secret weapon was … wait for it … the TTABlog.

Third, John has enriched our argot with initialisms such as WYHA? WYHO? WYHP?  Yes, I think the question mark itself forms part of each of those three initialisms.

Fourth, John permits any of us to subscribe to his blog.  It means we can learn of recent TTAB decisions.  And it is not merely that some TTAB decision got rendered.  We also get the benefit of John’s pithy analysis of the decision.  Maybe he thinks the outcome of the appeal was entirely predicable.  Maybe he thinks an appeal was wrongly decided.  In every one of his postings, I feel compelled to scroll down to the bottom to get his take on the appeal.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I think you should subscribe to the TTABlog if you have not already done so.