[E-trademarks] EUIPO and Benelux missing from Trademark Center

[Carl Oppedahl]

On 7/24/2024 4:49 AM, Carl Oppedahl via E-trademarks wrote:
> Second, when the time came to enter the details of the 44e filing 
> basis, so far as I could see it is impossible to set forth that the 
> filing basis is a registration /*granted by the European Union 
> Intellectual Property Office*/.  So I was forced to go back to TEAS 
> since TEAS does recognize EUIPO as a selection for the 44e office of 
> earlier filing.
>
> This is a sad repeat of a blunder made by the developers of Patent 
> Center.  With Patent Center as released, it was impossible to claim 
> priority from a prior application filed in EPO (or in any other 
> regional patent office).  It was clear in the case of Patent Center 
> that the developers stupidly just clicked around on the Internet for 
> some list of "all of the countries in the world" and copied and pasted 
> that list into the line of code that generated the drop-down list of 
> would-be priority Offices.  Of course the developers of Patent Center, 
> who promised that they were going to replicate all of the functions 
> and features of EFS-Web, should have done a simple code review of that 
> part of EFS-Web and would have seen that the drop-down list included 
> some places /*that are not countries*/.  The European Patent Office is 
> not a country.  But the developers of Patent Center had no clue that 
> the EPO is not a country, or that a customer of the USPTO might need 
> to claim priority from the EPO.
>
> It took some weeks but eventually the developers of Patent Center paid 
> attention to our bug report from the Patent Center listserv, and they 
> fixed their mistake.
>
> So here, too, what has apparently happened is the developers of 
> Trademark Center stupidly just clicked around on the Internet for some 
> list of "all of the countries in the world" and copied and pasted that 
> list into the line of code that generates the drop-down list of 
> would-be Offices for a 44e filing basis.   Of course the developers of 
> Trademark Center, who represent to us that they are supposedly 
> replicating all of the functions and features of TEAS, should have 
> done a simple code review of that part of TEAS and would have seen 
> that the drop-down list included some places /*that are not 
> countries*/.  The European Union Intellectual Property Office is not a 
> country. But the developers of Trademark Center have no clue that the 
> EUIPO is not a country, or that a customer of the USPTO might need to 
> list EUIPO as a 44e filing office.
>
I carried out a line-by-line cross-check of the two lists (TEAS and 
Trademark Center).  Here are the two lists of things that don't match.

Purported trademark offices that may be selected in TEAS, but not in 
Trademark Center:

 1. American Samoa
 2. Benelux
 3. England
 4. European Community - CTM
 5. European Union Trademark - EUTM
 6. Great Britain
 7. Guam
 8. Johnston Atoll
 9. Navassa Island
10. Northern Ireland
11. Northern Mariana Islands
12. Puerto Rico
13. Scotland
14. US Virgin Islands
15. Wake Island
16. Wales

Purported trademark offices that may be selected in Trademark Center, 
but not in TEAS:

 1. Aland Islands
 2. Antarctica
 3. Congo, the Democratic Republic of the (note that this is not the
    same as "Congo")
 4. French Southern Territories
 5. Kosovo
 6. New Caledonia
 7. Niue
 8. Norfolk Island
 9. Paracel Islands
10. Pitcairn
11. Reunion
12. Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha
13. Saint Pierre and Miquelon
14. South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
15. South Sudan
16. Svalbard and Jan Mayen
17. Tokelau

As for the seventeen purported trademark offices that may be selected in 
Trademark Center, but not in TEAS, some are particularly baffling.  
Paracel Islands, for example, is described in Wikipedia like this:

    The ownership of the [Paracel] islands remains hotly contested. The
    People's Republic of China (PRC) on mainland China, Vietnam, and the
    Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan all claim /de jure/ sovereignty,
    although the PRC has had /de facto /control of the archipelago since
    the Battle of the Paracel Islands in January 1974.

I am pretty sure there is no trademark office operated by the Paracel 
Islands.

I am absolutely sure there is no Antarctica trademark office.

The focus of this study of course, is to identify trademark offices that 
ought to be selectable in Trademark Center but are missing.  This draws 
our attention to the sixteen offices that can be selected in TEAS but 
cannot be selected in Trademark Center. It is easy to pick out three 
regional trademark offices that can be selected in TEAS but are missing 
from Trademark Center:

 1. Benelux
 2. European Community - CTM
 3. European Union Trademark - EUTM

The second one (CTM) needs to be on the list for purposes of 44e but is 
probably not needed for 44d.  (More than six months have passed since 
the last time anybody filed a CTM application.)




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