[E-trademarks] Unicode Growing Pains - Recent Registration Certificate Examples Are Disappointing

Wed Apr 16 15:23:26 UTC 2025

As a fun factoid, Anne Gundelfinger, president of INTA many, many years 
ago, is the general counsel and vice president of the Unicode 
Consortium. Small world.

Pam

Pamela S. Chestek
Chestek Legal
PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW MAILING ADDRESS
4641 Post St.
Unit 4316
El Dorado Hills, CA 95762
+1 919-800-8033
pamela at chesteklegal.com
www.chesteklegal.com

On 4/16/2025 2:00 AM, Carl Oppedahl via E-trademarks wrote:
>
> Thank you Ken for posting.
>
> I have several reactions to this.
>
> First, Ken's postings in the past few months about character coding 
> have prompted me personally to try to learn about Unicode.  It is a 
> fascinating world, this Unicode.  As time goes on, I must imagine that 
> trademark offices around the world will eventually gain familiarity 
> with Unicode.  The result, eventually, will be better ways of 
> searching, and better ways of storing mark information for searching.  
> And better ways of receiving trademark applications in the first 
> place, with applicants providing Unicode representations of marks 
> rather than mere images of marks.
>
> Second, Ken's postings have laid bare the many ways in which Trademark 
> Center (and USPTO's other related internal systems for trademark 
> application workflow) have failed to keep pace with Unicode.  Yes it 
> is one thing if, within recent days, the USPTO coders belatedly 
> started to check to see if the "mark" field in an application is or is 
> not composed solely of "standard characters".  But it is clear the 
> USPTO coders have not been checking to see if other fields (such as 
> the "translation" field and mailing address) contain non-ASCII Unicode 
> characters.
>
> WIPO, as the administrator of the PCT, Madrid, and Hague systems, has 
> historically served the IP community by nudging the world's 
> intellectual property offices along towards current developments.  
> There are many examples of this.  See for example the ST.26 standard 
> for submission of computer-readable genetic sequence listings.  I have 
> to imagine that our friends at WIPO are trying, as best they can, to 
> think about Unicode.  One of the challenges, of course, is that 
> because of the way that Madrid Protocol is structured, nobody can file 
> a Madrid application directly at the International Bureau.  (Direct 
> filing at the IB is possible for PCT and Hague applications, but not 
> for Madrid applications.)  Instead, the only entry path for a Madrid 
> application is a filing in one or another of the Offices of Origin.  
> OoOs surely differ greatly from one to the next as to the richness or 
> paucity of the various data fields. For all I know there may be some 
> OoOs for which the filing path even now in 2025 is in the nature of 
> stone tablets with chiseled writing.
>
> Some trademark offices are in places where non-Latin (non-ASCII) 
> characters are very important.  Here you can see (WIPO web site 
> <https://www.wipo.int/en/ipfactsandfigures/trademarks>) a ranking of 
> the ten biggest users of the Madrid system:
>
>  1. US
>  2. Germany
>  3. China
>  4. France
>  5. UK
>  6. Switzerland
>  7. Japan
>  8. Italy
>  9. Korea
> 10. Australia
>
> China, Japan, and Korea show up in the top ten, and in each of those 
> places, non-Latin (non-ASCII) characters are very important.  My sense 
> is that Unicode by now supports most languages including Chinese 
> (simplified and traditional), Japanese (katakana, hirigana, and 
> kanji), and Korean (hangul). Hopefully eventually the highest-volume 
> trademark offices will get together to try to work out ways to make 
> use of Unicode for filing of trademark applications, for searching, 
> for publication, and for other workflow purposes. Hopefully eventually 
> it would reach the point where a Madrid filing could contain a Unicode 
> mark, and no matter which Office is designated, the IB could transmit 
> the designation to the designated Office and that Office could 
> actually know what to do with the Unicode characters.
>
>
> On 4/15/2025 2:40 PM, Ken Boone via E-trademarks wrote:
>> Following are 4 recent registrations with Unicode characters in the 
>> translation/transliteration fields (as evident on the TSDR summary 
>> tab).  In each case, the Registration Certificate simply dropped the 
>> Unicode characters.
>>
>> Drawing
>> 	
>> SN
>> 	
>> RD
>> 	
>> Comment
>> _previously viewed Image for 98496184, select for more details_
>>
>> 	
>> 98496184
>> 	
>> 01/21/25
>> 	
>>  Translation:  The wording Benbo*奔博* has no meaning in a foreign 
>> language.
>>
>> Reg. Cert.:    The wording Benbo has no meaning in a foreign language.
>>
>> _previously viewed Image for 98469783, select for more details_
>>
>> 	
>> 98469783
>> 	
>> 04/08/25
>> 	
>>  Translation: The English translation of *雪冰* in the mark is SNOW ICE.
>>
>> Reg. Cert.:   The English translation of  in the mark is SNOW ICE.
>>
>> _previously viewed Image for 98384496, select for more details_
>>
>>
>> 	
>> 98384496
>> 	
>> 02/11/25
>> 	
>>  Translation:  The English translation of *金满庭* in the mark is Gold 
>> Filled Palace.
>>
>> Reg. Cert.:  The English translation of  in the mark is Gold Filled 
>> Palace.
>>
>> _previously viewed Image for 98018070, select for more details_
>>
>>
>> 	
>> 98018070
>> 	
>> 02/04/25
>> 	
>>  Translation:  The English translation of *瑞安房地產* in the mark is 
>> auspicious; peaceful; real estate.
>>
>> Reg. Cert.:  The English translation of  in the mark is auspicious; 
>> peaceful; real estate.
>>
>>
>>
>> Happy Unicoding!?!?!
>> Ken Boone
>>
>
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