[E-trademarks] Trademark Center just got worse

[Carl Oppedahl]

Some time in the past couple of weeks, Trademark Center got worse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

But what I did not know is that TC is now even more anti-user-friendly.  
TC also /*actively discarded all information about my applicant. */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".

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.

It gets worse.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh it gets worse.

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.

But in today's version of Trademark Center, the (half-size) list of 
entity types is /*randomly ordered. */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.

Again if there had been competent beta testing of the just-released 
version of Trademark Center, this would have been identified and corrected.

So I guess the near-term bug fixes are:

  * do not actively discard the applicant information in a "save as new
    draft".
  * restore the second half of the foreign-entity-type list.
  * restore the alphabetical order of the foreign-entity-type list.

And the missing-features list includes:

  * give us the fine-tuned foreign-entity-type selection that Acting
    Commissioner Hershkowitz promised to us six years ago.
  * do not actively discard the "mark" information in a "save as new draft".

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