[E-trademarks] TEAS Voluntary Amendment Doesn't Like Unicode Characters - See 99414215 - ?OCCETTA ????? RE INVENTED

[Carl Oppedahl]

Thank you Ken.

This is, of course, a /pro se/ case.   And not that it's relevant to the 
present topic of USPTO failing to handle Unicode correctly, I have to 
imagine the Examiner is going to refuse to enter the amendment on the 
grounds that adding color is a material alteration.

Returning to the Unicode topic.

There have been several of these 
USPTO-failing-to-handle-Unicode-correctly cases where the seeming common 
theme is that the filer used one or more characters that are 
unnecessarily exotic.  Here, for example, the application as filed used 
the "U+0412 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER VE" which in terms of ink on the 
page looks almost exactly like the Latin or Roman (or ASCII) letter "B".

Sometimes when somebody uses (for example) a Cyrillic VE ("В") instead 
of a Latin B, it is because the person is trying to be sneaky and get 
away with something.  For example the sneaky person registered the 
Internet domain name "CITIВANK.COM" (using the Cyrillic VE) and is 
planning to try to use it to steal money from customers of the real 
Citibank by setting up a fake duplicate of the Citibank web site.

Here, I don't immediately see anything in the TSDR record that suggests 
the trademark applicant is trying to get away with something evil.

Well, I guess I could think of one thing an applicant might be up to here.

Let's suppose our applicant in this case had done a search of Office 
records and saw that somebody already has a strong trademark 
registration for a standard-character word mark that looks just like 
this pending mark (in terms of ink on the page). And suppose the 
applicant is worried that that Examiner might impose a 2d refusal over 
that standard-character registration.  So then maybe the applicant hopes 
the Examiner will copy and paste the applied-for characters (including 
the Cyrillic VE) into the Examiner's search system and will  get no 
hits.  And thus no 2d refusal.

I don't mean to say that I have any particular reason to think the 
applicant is really trying to do this.  I am just trying to guess about 
things.

But then it seems to me that we would be reduced to trying to guess what 
innocent sequence of events would lead to this case having (for example) 
a Cyrillic VE ("В") instead of a Latin B. Was this the result of a 
super-buggy OCR engine within TC?



On 10/6/2025 11:27 AM, Ken Boone via E-trademarks wrote:
> Trademark Experts,
>
> Caution: It appears that the TEAS Voluntary Amendment form does not 
> understand Unicode characters outside the ASCII character set, 
> substituting question marks (?) for such Unicode characters.
>
> Consider 99414215, filed on 9/26 with *В CCETTA ВОССЕ RE 
> INVENTED* appearing as the wordmark.
>
> Image for 99414215
>
> Today, *?OCCETTA ????? RE INVENTED* is presented as the wordmark.  
> Why?  The Prosecution History shows that on Oct. 05, 2025, a TEAS 
> VOLUNTARY AMENDMENT was received, amending the drawing (the original 
> drawing did not include colors).  The new literal element *? CCETTA 
> ????? RE INVENTED* was provided. (I do not see any evidence that 
> Pre-Exam has performed any edits of this new application yet {i.e, the 
> prosecution history does not include the /NEW APPLICATION OFFICE 
> SUPPLIED DATA ENTERED/ entry}.)
>
> Using Carl's favorite character dumper 
> (https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html), the original 
> wordmark *В CCETTA ВОССЕ RE INVENTED* has multiple Unicode characters.
>
> U+0412 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER VE
> U+0020 : SPACE [SP]
> U+0043 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C
> U+0043 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C
> U+0045 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E
> U+0054 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T
> U+0054 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T
> U+0041 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
> U+0020 : SPACE [SP]
> U+0412 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER VE
> U+041E : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER O
> U+0421 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ES
> U+0421 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER ES
> U+0415 : CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER IE
> U+0020 : SPACE [SP]
> U+0052 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R
> U+0045 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E
> U+0020 : SPACE [SP]
> U+0049 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I
> U+004E : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N
> U+0056 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER V
> U+0045 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E
> U+004E : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N
> U+0054 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T
> U+0045 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E
> U+0044 : LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D
>
> I'm concluding that the newly provided literal element *? CCETTA ????? 
> RE INVENTED* closely matched the original wordmark *?OCCETTA ????? RE 
> INVENTED*, but that the TEAS VOLUNTARY AMENDMENT did not recognize the 
> Unicode characters outside the ASCII character set.
>
> BTW, everyone has noticed that the Beta viewer for Trademark Search 
> still provides incomplete information, right?  The */Announcements 
> /*page still shows the notice Update: On September 24, we temporarily 
> disabled some of these new beta features to test them further. We'll 
> remove this message once they are restored.
>
> Happy Trademark Amending,
> Ken Boone
>
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