<div dir="ltr"><div>A cautionary note on TTAB precedential decisions -- be careful what you wish for. The TTAB is not an Article III court. The Administrative Procedure Act puts adjudication and rulemaking on two sides of a "dichotomy." By design, agency decisions are <b>not</b> like Article III decisions, and do <b>not</b> have precedential binding effect. A few agencies have a statutory override of that default, but not the USPTO. Agency tribunals have a few small areas of "implicit" authority which can carry a little rulemaking authority, but they're very small. The Federal Circuit has so held in at least three decisions, <i>Facebook v. Windy City Innovations, LLC</i> (<i>Windy City II</i>), 973 F.3d 1321, 1351, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2855537312449971500">https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2855537312449971500</a> (Fed. Cir. 2020) (unanimous additional views); <i>Facebook, Inc. v. Windy City Innovations, LLC</i>, 953 F.3d 1313 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 18, 2020) (<i>Windy City I</i>) (unanimous additional views), <i>Aqua Prods., Inc. v. Matal</i>, 872 F.3d 1290, 1327 (Fed. Cir. 2017) (five judge plurality), 1339 (Reyna and Dyk concurring). In the waning days of Trump 34, the Department of Commerce issued a regulation instructing component agencies that they are not to attach force of law to documents that are not issued with the formality of regulation (in my view, this regulation basically restated statutory law, it was just a "get with the program" kick to agencies) <a href="https://www.ecfr.gov/on/2024-12-17/title-15/subtitle-A/part-29">https://www.ecfr.gov/on/2024-12-17/title-15/subtitle-A/part-29</a> but President Biden rescinded it effective January 17. I expect something very like it to reemerge soon.<br></div><div><br></div><div>In <i>Apple v. [Director of the Month, now Stewart</i>] I filed an amicus brief that explains how the PTAB broke the law by pretending to be an Article III court and attaching "precedential" weight to its own decisions. This brief includes a short overview of what the PTAB can and can't do by precedential decision <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=5016833" target="_blank">https://ssrn.com/abstract=5016833</a> at pages 21-22. A longer, exhaustively-detailed explanation of what an agency can and can't do by precedential decision is at David Boundy, <i>The PTAB Is Not an Article III Court, Part 3:
Precedential and Informative Opinions, </i>AIPLA
Quarterly Journal vol. 47 No. 1 pp. 1-99 (June 2019). The SSRN edition
has updates updating to reflect later case law (notably <i>Loper Bright</i>, <i>Kisor v Wilkie</i>, and <i>Hyatt v. PTO </i>, available at SSRN <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=3258694" target="_blank">https://ssrn.com/abstract=3258694</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>Jason, you should read the article. Start at pages *4-*6 and *34-*41</div><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 8:37\u202fPM Carl Oppedahl via E-trademarks <<a href="mailto:e-trademarks@oppedahl-lists.com">e-trademarks@oppedahl-lists.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
<div>
<p>Hello listserv members. I received an inquiry just now from
Jason Elster, who is a new member of the e-trademarks listserv.
He is a member of INTA's Precedential Decisions Task Force. This
task force has a goal of substantially increasing the number of
precedential decisions issued by the Trademark Office\u2019s Trademark
Trial and Appeal Board each year.</p>
<p>Members might or might not be familiar with the web page <a href="https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/ptab-decision-nomination" target="_blank">Nomination
for Designation or De-Designation of PTAB Decisions</a>. This
submission form allows individuals to nominate any routine
decision of the Board for designation as precedential or
informative.</p>
<p>Jason asked if I thought it would be appropriate for him to post
to the listserv about this. And I have encouraged him to do so.
I imagine that presently he will post something about this topic.<br>
</p>
<p>My own personal view is that it would be helpful if more PTAB
decisions could be precedential. There have been quite a few
times over the years when I would happen upon some decision and
would wish that I could have cited it in some document, and then I
would see that the decision has been designated
non-precedential. <br>
</p>
<p>I guess probably nobody likes to come out and say it, but I think
that there is a rarely-said-out-loud feeling with some trademark
practitioners that one worries that when a panel issues a decision
that is designated non-precedential, this might somehow count as
license or permission for the author of the decision to ... not
flesh out the reasoning quite as fully or cogently. And that if
more panels were to crank out more decisions with the idea and
expectation that they would be precedential, the result would be a
larger number of higher-quality decisions that would work to
everybody's benefit.</p>
<p>Having said all of this, I certainly do recognize that some
fraction of cases necessarily get decided based purely on a narrow
set of facts, where there is just no reason to think that any
later case would have its own set of facts that would track so
closely as to benefit from the earlier case being precedential.
To say this another way, when a case is tied to some very narrow
set of facts, I am prepared to cut some slack for the author of
the decision. I am prepared to accept the decision being a
document that does not get the benefit of the fine-tuning that
would go into a precedential decision.</p>
<p>What I do not mean to do here is to speak for Jason. I am sure
he has his own goals in terms of inviting practitioners to make
use of the form and how to describe why he thinks it would be a
good idea.</p>
<br>
</div>
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