[E-trademarks] Solicitation from Chinese Firm

Thu Sep 25 14:39:42 EDT 2025

[laugh]         Bernheisel, Sarah reacted to your message:
________________________________
From: E-trademarks <e-trademarks-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> on behalf of Jessica R. Friedman via E-trademarks <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2025 6:29:10 PM
To: For trademark practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice. <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: Jessica R. Friedman <jrfriedman at litproplaw.com>
Subject: Re: [E-trademarks] Solicitation from Chinese Firm

Wow. But I think I’ll pass. :-) Jessica R. Friedman Attorney at Law 300 East 59 Street, Ste. 2406 New York, NY 10022 Pho͏‌͏
[External email]<https://summary.us1.defend.egress.com/v3/summary?ref=email&crId=68d58aa65719c663a9b6d3ce&lang=en>
[Contains topics of a financial nature]<https://summary.us1.defend.egress.com/v3/summary?ref=email&crId=68d58aa65719c663a9b6d3ce&lang=en>

Wow. But I think I’ll pass. :-)

Jessica R. Friedman

Attorney at Law

300 East 59 Street, Ste. 2406

New York, NY 10022

Phone: 212-220-0900

Cell: 917-647-1884

E-mail: jrfriedman at litproplaw.com<mailto:jrfriedman at litproplaw.com>

URL: www.literarypropertylaw.com<http://www.literarypropertylaw.com>

[1479430908386_PastedImage]

From: E-trademarks <e-trademarks-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com> on behalf of Stacy Grossman via E-trademarks <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>
Date: Thursday, September 25, 2025 at 2:28 PM
To: For trademark practitioners. This is not for laypersons to seek legal advice. <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>
Cc: Stacy Grossman <sgrossman at sgip.law>
Subject: [E-trademarks] Solicitation from Chinese Firm

Sharing selections from an email received from a firm in China.

Anyone interested???  ;-)

Hi, I am a trademark attorney for XXX Firm in China and we express our desire to seek a key partner to build win-win cooperation in the area of patents, designs and trademarks, licensing and infringement, especially in trademark registration.

***

Our client's budget is $50 per new trademark application agent fees.

Response OA (including the fee for changing the agency) - $35

SOU (including the fee for changing the agency) - $35

Setion 8 (including the fee for changing the agency) - $50

[https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4x2FZFeMgXSIxdT2_iGax51yNamPn7xZvgt2ahQHSd78J1g_Ibu1paMDQQX6GdEaytyBowtnJrjGULO]

STACY J. GROSSMAN

PRINCIPAL

o: (212) 873-6120

m: (917) 693-9143

e: sgrossman at sgip.law

www.sgip.law<http://www.sgip.law/>

On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 4:46 PM Ken Boone via E-trademarks <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>> wrote:
Another irregularity: the new Beta view of the TSDR-like record for 99407734 does NOT show the Attorney info, the Correspondence info, or the Prosecution history (including the raw application).  Since that Beta view is more copy/paste friendly, here's the relevant portion of that Beta view.

Attorney information
N/A
Correspondence information
Name
undefined
Address
Email
Prosecution history and documents

Documents only
Date
Description
Document
Proceeding
Items per page:
5
0 of 0
Proceedings
N/A

Of course, this Beta view of the TSDR-like record was not possible on Trademark Search yesterday, as this new application was not available on Trademark Search until today's update occurred.  (Yes, I was confused yesterday when trying to find this application on Trademark Search until I noticed the filing date of this application.)

Hope this helps,
Ken Boone
________________________________
From: E-trademarks <e-trademarks-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:e-trademarks-bounces at oppedahl-lists.com>> on behalf of Carl Oppedahl via E-trademarks <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>>
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2025 12:07 PM
To: for trademark practitioners <e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com<mailto:e-trademarks at oppedahl-lists.com>>
Cc: Carl Oppedahl <carl at oppedahl.com<mailto:carl at oppedahl.com>>; TEAS <teas at uspto.gov<mailto:teas at uspto.gov>>
Subject: [E-trademarks] Yet another really bad defect in Trademark Center

If the USPTO had done even half-decent beta testing of TC, then the really bad defect that I am about to describe would never have gotten into the production version of TC.

To say this differently, the fact that the defect I am about to describe is right now present in the production version of TC absolutely proves that the so-called "beta testing" of TC was no such thing.  It was, at best, sort of going through the motions, pretending to do genuine beta testing but utterly failing to do proper beta testing.

Take a look at this TSDR page.<https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=99407734&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch>  What does it show as the mark?  You can see it on that page.  That page says the mark is "FX BRALN AR".

Now the first reaction that many might have is that this application must be one of those Chinese applications that strings together six or seven consonants, tosses in one random vowel, and finishes with a mark that no human mouth could ever pronounce.  But no, this application cannot be one of those, because it has spaces in it.  The randomly generated Chinese filings never have spaces in them.

Okay so what explains this weird mark?  The next step for the forensic analysis of the defective Trademark Center is to click in TSDR on "documents" and click on "Application".

At this point, we need to start very carefully distinguishing between "actual characters that the practitioner entered into TC" and "stuff that got generated by defective software that is not the fault of the customer".

First let's focus on "actual characters that the practitioner entered into TC".  And the place to find this is by scrolling down to "mark description".   This is exactly what the practitioner copied and pasted into Trademark Center during the e-filing process.  The practitioner pasted this:

the characters "FX brAIn AR"

Now at this point what the forensic analysis requires is some absolutely authoritative way to prove that the practitioner either copied and pasted an "I" or an "L" (or maybe a vertical bar!) into that place between the "A" and the "n".  Yes, one possibility is that this screwup is the practitioner's fault, because the practitioner copied and pasted an "L".  The other possibility is that the USPTO developers of Trademark Center screwed up in the coding of the software (and failed to do proper beta testing), and somehow placed into production some software that would methodically change an "I" into an "L" in a way that would not be apparent to the practitioner at any point in the e-filing process but that would reveal itself only after the application had been e-filed, when it is too late to fix.

Which of these two things is true?  Did the practitioner screw up?  Or did the developers screw up?

My favorite forensic-analysis tool for uncovering mistakes about character coding is this Unicode decoder<https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html>.  There are many tools that provide this kind of coding analysis but this one is my personal favorite.  So you can follow along with this if you like.  It is actually a very helpful learning opportunity for practitioners to learn about Unicode.  (And it would be a very helpful learning opportunity for the USPTO developers who gave us Trademark Center.)  So please, settle down with a source of caffeine and click along with me.

You open up this Unicode decoder<https://www.babelstone.co.uk/Unicode/whatisit.html> and you get ready to use it.  But next, open a new browser window and click on the TSDR page<https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=99407734&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch>, click on "documents", click on "application", scroll down to the "mark description".  Copy the mark description which is "FX brAIn AR" and paste it into the Unicode decoder.  Click on "identify".  What you will see on your own computer screen is this:

[cid:ii_199821e207c66a7da931]

This proves that the party who screwed up was not the practitioner.  This proves that what the practitioner copied and pasted into Trademark Center was a "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I".

So we now scratch our heads and we try to work out what exactly are the very poor software decisions inside Trademark Center that somehow led to this situation that what auto-loaded into TSDR in the most prominent field was "FX BRALN AR".  What were the software decisions somehow changed the "I" to an "L" during the e-filing process and yet concealed it from the practitioner and then waited until after the practitioner clicked "submit" to reveal the change?

How could this possibly have happened in the software?

I have a theory as to the mistakes made by the developers in this specific case.  I cannot be sure about it because of course the developers don't do their work in an open-source way (open to the user community).  But this is my theory.

Recall that during the filing process, TC asks whether you want a standard character mark or a stylized mark and so on.  If you pick anything other than "standard character" then TC requires that you upload a drawing.  In this case the practitioner uploaded this drawing:

[cid:ii_199821e207c53e84a8d2]

As we know, the drawing is a raster drawing (not vector-drawn).  It is just individual pixels that are either black or white.  When you are in raster world, nothing about the computer file takes a position one way or the other as to whether the thing between the "A" and the "n" is a vertical bar or an uppercase sans-serif "I" or is a lower-case sans-serif "L" or maybe is none of those things.  It is just a bunch of pixels.

Here is where the TC developers thought they were smarter than everybody else.  At this stage, the TC developers made use of some OCR engine and ran it on the drawing, and then the software popped up a message on the screen that asked "we think the literal element of your mark is this, did we get it right?"  And the "literal element" characters on the screen were:

FX brAln AR

At this point, the practitioner looked at the screen, and it didn't look wrong.  So the practitioner clicked to say "yes that looks like our literal element".

Here is the evil, I think.  I think the TC developers' OCR engine wrongly identified that character as a lower-case L.

Our forensic analysis proves this.  Go to the "application" file in TSDR and scroll back up a line or two to "literal element" and you will see "FX brAln AR".  Now you can copy and paste the "literal element" into the Unicode decoder and here is what you get:

[cid:ii_199821e207ce75dfb5b3]

Yes, the "literal element" OCR engine employed by the TC developers wrongly identified the thing between the A and n as a SMALL LETTER L.

During the e-filing process, this mistake would never have revealed itself to the practitioner for at least two reasons.  First, the developers chose to use a sans-serif font that makes it impossible to visually distinguish a lower-case L from an uppercase I. Second, the dramatic reveal (converting the entirety of the literal element into ALL UPPERCASE LETTERS) happened only after the practitioner clicked "submit".

As I say, I cannot be absolutely sure that what I just described in the previous ten paragraphs is exactly what they did wrong.  It is only my educated guess from the forensic analysis and from my decades of experience in the world of computer programming.

But if there had been anything close to competent beta testing done, this would have revealed itself long before the end of the beta testing process.

The biggest design blunder was to postpone the conversion to ALL UPPER CASE of the "literal element" characters until it was too late for the practitioner to see what the OCR software had gotten wrong.  If you, as a developer, are aware that what will get loaded into the most prominent place in TSDR is the ALL UPPER CASE version of the "literal element" characters, then you need to fess up to this at the earliest possible point in the Trademark Center click path.

A lesser but still significant blunder was to fail to use a serif font at this most crucial stage of the click path.  The serif font might well have tipped off the practitioner of the OCR fail.

At the point in the click path where the developers say "we think the literal element of your mark is this, did we get it right?", what absolutely should have appeared on the screen is the text that later got slotted into that most prominent place in TSDR.  What should have appeared on the TC screen was:

FX BRALN AR

Again, in case I perhaps failed to mention it, had the purported "beta testing" of Trademark Center actually taken place, this user interface mistake would have gotten caught and corrected long before the release of Trademark Center into production service.

Given that the USPTO's CX team for Trademark Center is now decimated, with a staff size of "1", and given that the purported "beta testing" of TC allowed mistakes like this to reach production service, I am aghast that the Trademark Office would now plow ahead with continued cutoff of other TEAS functions.  According to the earlier-quoted email, the next two TEAS functions to be cut off would apparently be the Voluntary Amendment ("VA") form and the and Change Address or Representation ("CAR") form.

There should be a hard stop on any further cutoff of TEAS functions (by which I mean migrating them to TC) until such time as the Trademark Office works out a proper way to beta-test its work with the expansion (mission creep) of TC.

See the three recent postings about experiences that three people had as they participated in the purported "beta testing" of Trademark Center, to get a sense of how badly the purported "beta testing" fell when compared with what proper beta testing would have been like.  USPTO interviewers, for example, who made clear from their questions that they had not even a clue about what it means to prepare or file a trademark application.

Again to anyone at the USPTO who might listen, the hundreds of members of the e-trademarks listserv stand ready to help.

Carl

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