The USPTO has apparently discontinued recognizing the Madrid Protocol status of US trademark registrations. Nobody outside the USPTO knows why.
The United States joined the Madrid Protocol on August 2, 2003. Madrid filers around the world were able to designate the US starting on November 2, 2003. The USPTO assigned series code 79 as the first two digits of trademark application numbers stemming from such designations.
No 79-series applications reached registration in 2003 or 2004. The first year in which any 79-series application reached registration was 2005. Our firm was one of the very first to prosecute such a 79-series application to registration, which happened on Tuesday, August 2, 2005, as may be seen in the certificate quoted above. (The application number was 79000965, meaning that it was the 965th time that an applicant had designated the US in a Madrid Protocol application.)
As you can see in the certificate (emphasized in green), the USPTO recognized the Madrid Protocol status of this US trademark registration by reciting the following words in the certificate:
Owner of international registration 0813384 dated 10-20-2003
And so things continued up to and including Tuesday, August 5, 2025.
But on Tuesday, August 12, 2025, things changed. The USPTO did not recognize the Madrid Protocol status of any registration granted that day. Nor has the USPTO recognized the Madrid Protocol status of any registration since August 12.
This change in the USPTO’s behavior was noticed by alert reader and experienced practitioner Katherine Koenig, and she reported it in the e-Trademarks listserv, a community of about a thousand trademark practitioners. She called the Trademark Assistance Center a few weeks ago to ask for a reprint of the first certificate that she encountered that was missing the recognition statement. She was assured it was a USPTO mistake that would be corrected. It has not, however, yet been fixed.
Listserv member Ken Boone searched some Trademark Office databases and pinned down the date of the USPTO’s behavior change. It was he who found that the last date of a Madrid Protocol recognition was Tuesday, August 5, 2025.
As of right now, no one outside of the USPTO knows why the USPTO stopped recognizing the Madrid Protocol status on Tuesday, August 12, 2025.
If you, dear reader, have any hint of why the USPTO changed its behavior on this, I would be grateful if you could drop me a private email or post a comment below.
It is still recognizable by the 79 series code serial number, however, at least until that ends.