The very handy “maintenance” tab in TSDR that had been missing for the past year or so … the very welcome and good news is that this “maintenance” tab is back!
USPTO’s Trademark Status and Document Review (TSDR) database is an important part of the daily life of anyone who works with US trademark applications and registrations. It will be recalled that in 2015 the USPTO released a new version of TSDR that provided an extremely helpful “maintenance” tab for granted registrations. This tab summarized the maintenance status of the registration and, importantly, displayed the upcoming renewal dates. Only a few weeks later, the tab disappeared. USPTO announced that it had “temporarily disabled” the tab.
The “temporary” disabling of the “maintenance” tab lasted well over a year. But now the tab is back.
In any law firm or corporate trademark department, one of the happy users of this tab will be the docket clerk. The docket clerk will bring up the registration in the docket system, so as to display the upcoming dockets. The clerk can then compare TSDR’s dates with the dates in the docket system. If they match, then that’s great. If they don’t match, then the clerk can study the situation closely to see why it is that they do not match. This permits correction of (for example) an incorrect registration date in the docket system.
But it’s not only the docket clerk. In any law firm or corporate trademark department, there will be people whose job it is to report to the client the upcoming due dates for the next renewal. Such a person can simply copy and paste the dates from the “maintenance” tab into the reporting email message.
Still another category of grateful user will be the person who needs to write to a client about upcoming decisions. Over the decades I have written many, many emails to clients telling them that some renewal is coming up and further telling them that oh, by the way, this would be a good time to consider whether to make the registration “incontestable”. But every now and then I have screwed up and have recommended an “incontestability” filing for a registration that (unbeknownst to me, since I somehow overlooked it) was in fact already “incontestable”. One of the delightful features provided by the USPTO in this “maintenance” tab is that it tells you if the registration has already been made “incontestable”.
So when I am getting ready to send such an email to a client, I can simply take a quick look at the “maintenance” tab. If it says the registration is already “incontestable”, then I can avoid the embarrassment of recommending a filing to make the registration “incontestable”.
Kudos to the USPTO for bringing back this very helpful feature of TSDR!
If you have not already done so, you should forward this blog article to your docket clerk and to everyone in your office who regularly works on US trademark files. (While you’re at it, please mention to them that they may wish to subscribe to this blog so that they can keep up to date on things like this.)
How do you (or how will you) make use of the “maintenance” tab in TSDR? Please post a comment below.