The Trademark Office at the USPTO does not handle Unicode characters well. This blog post discusses a recent example of this.
Over the decades, there have been many ways to store human-readable chracters in computers. I came to the world of computers when ASCII and Baudot were in daily use, and IBM’s EBCDIC was a path that was (mercifully) later abandoned. In recent decades the Unicode standard has benefited everybody.
The USPTO, perhaps predictably, devised its own way of storing store human-readable chracters in its computers, namely “USPTO standard characters”. The “USPTO standard character set” was the 127 ASCII decimal values plus another (I am not making this up) 240 or so decimal values, finishing at decimal 382.) Note that the number of “USPTO standard characters” did not map to any power of two or to any number of bytes, thus guaranteeing inefficient storage in any ordinary computer storage medium.)
In the past year or so, the Trademark Office at the USPTO has been dragged kicking and screaming into the world of Unicode, and thus into the present century. This has led to many missteps in the software development of various Trademark Office system. Some of the missteps are merely humorous. But this blog article describes a misstep that actively harms the trademark search process.
I learned about this misstep, as I have learned about Unicode in general, from Ken Boone, a member of the e-Trademarks listserv who until his retirement had been a career employee of the Trademark Office.
I’ll let Ken explain the background for this particular misstep:
For over 20 years, the [Trademark Office] accepted μ as a standard character without any problems, as the μ (decimal value 181) was handled appropriately on the various Trademark systems. Note that μ is the only Greek character in the [USPTO] standard character set. Technically, μ is a lower case character without an equivalent upper case character in the [USPTO] standard character set. Also, [the Trademark Office] traditionally has converted wordmark entries into upper-case characters, though having no upper-case character equivalent for μ, historically, occurrences of μ in wordmark entries were not impacted by that lower-case to upper-case conversion.
But time marches forward, and recently [the Trademark Office] upgraded their systems to accept Unicode characters (decimal values above 255), opening Trademark systems to many other Greek characters. [In Unicode, the USPTO] standard character μ has the upper case equivalent Μ (decimal 924), and suddenly occurrences of μ were being converted to Μ (decimal 924) in wordmark entries.
[The Trademark Office] did NOT add Μ (decimal 924) to the [USPTO] standard character list. [The Trademark Office] did not upgrade the search system to equate standard character μ to the upper case equivalent Μ (decimal 924) for trademark searches. That is, [the Trademark Office] began converting the standard character μ into the non-standard character Μ (decimal 924) for new applications, including standard character mark applications. (In theory, if an older trademark having μ in the wordmark is modified (a non-material alteration), that older trademark suddenly could have Μ (decimal 924) in the wordmark.)
Ken asks if he is the only one who considers that Μ-for-μ conversion in wordmark entries a problem?
My reaction to this problem, which I knew nothing of until Ken identified it, is that this is indeed a problem. Do you? Please post a comment below.