<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<p>Some time in the past couple of weeks, Trademark Center got
worse.</p>
<p>You know how the good system (TEAS) permitted the practitioner to
save an XML template for reuse in future applications. And this
meant (among other things) that the practitioner could edit the
template (for example in Notepad) to fine-tune the template for
some future filing or filings. This permitted reuse of
information from one filing to the next.</p>
<p>And you know how the designers of Trademark Center dropped that
feature. Instead, the only way to try (as best one could) to
reuse information from one filing to the next is "save as new
draft". Unfortunately this SAND path is poorly designed in
several ways. One way is that it actively discards any
information about the mark, which is bad for the practitioner who
now needs to do another filing for the same mark but for different
goods. This is especially anti-user-friendly for one of those
marks that requires ten or twenty or fifty mouse clicks in TC to
construct the mark. Yes it is a logo with text, yes there is
non-English wording in the text, here is what you get when you
translate that word into English, and so on.</p>
<p>A second bad thing about this SAND path (as compared with the XML
template path) is that to make use of the SAND path, you need to
somehow already know that the designers of TC made it so that it
is impossible to "save as new draft" once you have clicked
"submit". You need to somehow already know, prior to clicking
"submit", that you might later need to reuse the information.</p>
<p>This is of course case of being actively non-user-friendly that
would have been smoked out and corrected during beta test, if
there had been competent beta test.</p>
<p>In my case, today, I needed to do a new filing for an existing
applicant client. So I went over to "my drafts" and scrolled down
to find one of my "new drafts" that explicitly listed this
particular client. I then cloned that draft, saving the clone as
a "new draft". I then proceeded to edit that draft. </p>
<p>I already knew about the non-user-friendly aspect that TC was
going to actively discard any information about the mark. In this
particular case, that was not a big problem for me because it was
going to be fairly quick and easy to insert the new mark (my good
luck is that this case is a standard character mark with no
foreign language in it).</p>
<p>But what I did not know is that TC is now even more
anti-user-friendly. TC also <i><b>actively discarded all
information about my applicant. </b></i>This means, among
other things, that I would need to reconstruct the entity country,
entity type, mailing address, domicile address, and so on. Thirty
mouse clicks to reconstruct what should have been preserved in the
"save as new draft".</p>
<p>In the days of user-friendly TEAS, I would have simply uploaded
my template and none of this information would have gotten
actively discarded by the USPTO software.</p>
<p>It gets worse. </p>
<p>Recall that in TEAS, for "entity type", you would have an
opportunity to select any foreign entity type from a very long and
rich list of entity types. Unfortunately that very long and rich
list actively commingled every possible language of entity type --
French, Spanish, German, and so on. At least it was alphabetical.</p>
<p>And recall that since more than ten years ago, the trademark
community had been begging and begging the Acting Commissioners
and Commissioners to fine-tune the foreign-entity-type list so
that you could pick a country and then it would offer a short list
of the entity types that make sense for that country. And if I
recall correctly, back in 2019, we extracted a commitment from
Acting Commissioner <span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">Meryl
Hershkowitz that TEAS would get improved in this way. If I
recall further, Commissioner Gooder told us that while this
improvement was coming Real Soon Now, we would not see it in
TEAS but would see it in the soon-to-be-rolled-out Trademark
Center.</span></p>
<p><span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">Trademark
Center got rolled out and no, the fine-tuned foreign-entity-type
feature was not there. We were left with the same
implementation in TC that we had in TEAS, namely the very long
list of entity types, with languages intermingled.</span></p>
<p><span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">But
it gets worse. Some time in the past couple of weeks, the
Trademark Center developers decided to cut the long list of
foreign entity types in half. There are now only about half as
many choices as there were a month ago. One of the foreign
entity types that got cut was the one I needed today -- "Société
à Responsabilité Limitée". It's just gone. There cannot
possible be a good reason for cutting half of the list.</span></p>
<p><span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">I
suspect that this is why my applicant information got actively
deleted from my "new draft". The draft I was reusing had my
client listed as a "Société à Responsabilité Limitée" and now
that entity type is gone, so the USPTO coders decided the right
thing to do was to actively discard everything else about my
client.</span></p>
<p><span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">This
is yet another example of a thing that would have been
identified and corrected if there had been competent beta
testing of the just-released version of Trademark Center.</span></p>
<p><span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">Oh
it gets worse.</span></p>
<p><span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">In
previous versions of TC and in TEAS, the long and rich list of
foreign entity types was alphabetical. You could scroll up and
down to find your needed entity type and that was it.</span></p>
<p><span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">But
in today's version of Trademark Center, the (half-size) list of
entity types is <i><b>randomly ordered. </b></i>So the treasure
hunt for "Société à Responsabilité Limitée" requires scrolling
all the way up and then all the way down, and no it seems not to
be there. And then the practitioner feels the need to scroll up
and down a second and maybe third time because maybe in the
random list it can be seen somewhere.</span></p>
<p><span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">Again
if there had been competent beta testing of the just-released
version of Trademark Center, this would have been identified and
corrected.</span></p>
<p><span
style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;"></span></p>
<p>So I guess the near-term bug fixes are:</p>
<ul>
<li>do not actively discard the applicant information in a "save
as new draft".</li>
<li>restore the second half of the foreign-entity-type list.</li>
<li>restore the alphabetical order of the foreign-entity-type
list.</li>
</ul>
<p>And the missing-features list includes:</p>
<ul>
<li>give us the fine-tuned foreign-entity-type selection that
Acting Commissioner Hershkowitz promised to us six years ago.</li>
<li>do not actively discard the "mark" information in a "save as
new draft".</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>