[E-trademarks] The Commercial Impression Of Æ (Dec 198) On TESS?

[Ken Boone]

Closing out my list of special TESS searches today, I stumbled over Æ, capital AE ligature, the standard character with decimal value 198 (not to be confused with æ, small ae ligature, the standard character with decimal value 230, except the USPTO tends to convert word mark entries to UPPER CASE CHARACTERS only, so any occurrences of æ in word marks likely were converted to Æ at the USPTO, except if someone at the USPTO decided to convert Æ to the pair of letters AE, how would we ever know?).

The Special Search Features<https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/webaka/html/help.htm#SpecSear> link of the current TESS online help takes you to https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/webaka/html/help.htm#SpecSear where you'll see that Æ is equivalent to any of the characters A a À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ à á â ã ä å æ for searching, which I'm pretty sure was just a compromise back in the early 2000's because I could not get any specific directions from the attorneys at the USPTO on how Æ became a standard character and what was I supposed to do with it on TESS.  The simple (and I expected temporary) compromise: if Æ ever was to occur on TESS, just treat it like an ordinary A.

On current TESS, the search *Æ*[MI] not dead[ld] returns 2,432,373 hits, just like the *A*[MI] not dead[ld] search.  Pretty boring, huh?

But on TESS Beta, the search LD:true AND WD:*Æ* only returns 19,584 hits.  Clearly, TESS Beta has a different commercial impression of Æ than current TESS, but the quick guess that Æ was treated as the two consecutive characters AE is quickly confirmed by the Beta search LD:true AND WD:*AE* that also retrieves 19,584 hits, or are those matching hit counts just coincidence?

But the current TESS still has the old Decimal Mark index (for another 17 days?), and the current TESS search 198[DM] not dead[ld] returns ...

wait for it ...

153 hits like ...

​   SN         RN      Word Mark
85839883    4430226     ADVISORTHOPÆDICS
79301678    6741553     CYKLÆR
79350730    7109912     ÆQUITELA
77374702    3880292     KJÆR WEIS
79224925    5635018     DÆHLIE
88693238    6076921     TRÆFIK
88725750    6406331     FÆRWORLD DAUGHTERS OF TIME
88444081    6943718     SKÆRE
88976074    5921137     ENCYCLOPÆDIA IRANICA FOUNDATION
90767565    6842799     TRÆFIK PROXY 
90429340    6822065     PRÆY DIFFERENT  
90513043    6783450     THE CÆP

(yes, I purposely selected only standard character marks from the 153 hits) where clearly occurrences of Æ have a different commercial impression to the single letter A or the letter pair AE, at læst to me. ;-}

I'm thinking that's enough of a distraction for today.  Back to work!!!    And get all your decimal mark searches done before the current TESS retires in 17 days.

______________________
Ken Boone
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://oppedahl-lists.com/pipermail/e-trademarks_oppedahl-lists.com/attachments/20231113/dcd1008c/attachment.htm>