[E-trademarks] Trademark Center developers have corrected their fail! (Standard Character Watch - Z‧PILOT or Z·PILOT)

[Ken Boone]

Thank you for this posting.


>> My best guess is that nobody from the Trademark Office did Ken the courtesy of letting him know that the developers corrected their software fail.

No, the USPTO did not let me know that the developers corrected their software.  I'm curious of exactly when the USPTO did correct their software and suspect it was after 9/11 considering the following standard character mark application (where any check for standard characters failed to detect the 📞 character that was presented as a box in the USPTO generated standard character drawing).


Check to tag for 99388850
Trademark
[Image for 99388850]
Wordmark
THE COMPANION LINE “WHERE LISTENING COMES FIRST” 📞
Serial number
99388850
Registration number
N/A
Filing date
2025-09-11

Yes, I copied that application info directly from the new beta view of Trademark Search while composing this email. Looks okay while editing.

Happy Trademarking,
Ken Boone

________________________________
From: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2025 1:57 AM
To: For trademark practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice. <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>
Subject: Trademark Center developers have corrected their fail! (Standard Character Watch - Z‧PILOT or Z·PILOT)


Here (TSDR<https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=99134995&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch>) is one of the dozens of pending cases at the USPTO that Ken flagged in his posting on May 7, 2025.  The mark is Z·PILOT, which at the time it was filed (April 14, 2025) contained a unicode "hyphenation point" between the Z and the PILOT.  This was a unicode hex 2027 character which is not a standard character.

And yet the applicant, in the e-filing process on April 14, was able to get away with checking the box to say that it was supposedly a standard character mark.

I flagged this specific software fail in a followup posting to the listserv, following up on Ken's post.

This was a fail on the part of the developers of Trademark Center.  The software should have refused to permit the filer to get away with checking the "standard character" box given that the "hyphenation point" is not a standard character.  But on April 14, 2025 the Trademark Center software snoozed through it and did not notice that the filer was trying to use a character that is not a "standard character" as defined by<https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/standard-character-set> the Trademark Office.

Two things have happened some time after Ken flagged this issue:

  *   in this particular case 99134995 the Trademark Office very quietly lurched back and forth and eventually got the character "standardized", and
  *   the Trademark Office corrected its software fail, so that now Trademark Center will catch this kind of problem.

Quiet lurching back and forth.  The application got filed on April 14.  Ken flagged the fail on May 7.

Then on August 22 (after Ken's posting and my followup posting) some nameless person at the Trademark Office mailed out a Notice of Design Search Code, saying:

26.11.02 - Plain single line rectangles
26.11.02 - Rectangles (single line)

The design search codes were, of course, absolutely nuts.  There are no rectangles anywhere in this mark, nor any "single lines".  Completely nuts.  My guess is the nameless person selected these design search codes not because they made sense but specifically because they were nuts, as a way to force the Examiner to deal with it.

Then the case got assigned to an Examiner.  This was on September 9.  And that same day the Examiner phoned up the applicant's attorney, according to a "note to file", and "confirmed proper appearance of standard character mark with attorney and updated drawing".

And the Examiner changed the Unicode "hyphenation point" into a standard-character "middle dot".  This was on September 9.  This does straighten out the standard-character issue in this case.

Oh and the wacko crazy design search codes about single-line rectangles have gotten deleted from the case.  I am guessing that the Examiner was the one who cleaned that up.

And now it is September 16 and the Examiner has mailed out an Office Action on a separate issue, unrelated to this "standard character" stuff.  The case is moving forward.

Correcting software fail in Trademark Center.  As of April 14, 2025 the Trademark Center software was defective and would fail to notice if a filer's proposed mark might happen to fail to be made completely of "standard characters".  But (I just today tested this in Trademark Center) if I were to try to file the same thing that the applicant filed on April 14, 2025, Trademark Center very correctly will puke on the proposed mark.  It says:

This entry must be in standard characters. ‧ is not part of the standard character set<https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/standard-character-set>.

So some time between April 14 and today (September 16), the Trademark Office developers corrected the fail in the software.

What I can tell you is that nobody from the Trademark Office did me the courtesy of letting me know that the developers corrected their software fail.

My best guess is that nobody from the Trademark Office did Ken the courtesy of letting him know that the developers corrected their software fail.

But the software did get corrected at the Trademark Office some time during those five months.  Now if a filer were to try to use a non-standard character, the software will puke on it as quoted above in red.



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