TRADEMARKS PENDING
TRADEMARKS REGISTERED
Subscriber Notice

2000 April Issue

We are pleased to announce an enhancement to the trademark data included on the 2000 April issues of Trademarks PENDING and Trademarks REGISTERED. Our engineers have corrected display problems with several punctuation and other special characters so that they now display properly in database records and are also searchable. Some of these characters were displayed as corrupted characters on recent discs. The exporting function has been tested and these characters export properly.

Trademarks with words containing punctuation or characters such as "don't" or "mañana" were often corrupted, with the apostrophe (') being displayed as "Æ" or the tilde (~) as "±." This made the record difficult to understand and the words containing these characters were not searchable. The following provides some of these special characters, listing the character and how it is displayed after this enhancement:

Please note that even with these improvements, some words that include apostrophes were entered into the system with an additional space following the apostrophe. For example, if you had searched for the terms "you've" or "children's" you would have missed the records containing the additional space, "you' ve" or "children' s." There are also records containing a question mark (?) and a space in the place of the apostrophe. When this occurs, the question mark is dropped and is indexed as a space. Composing your search statement using the following approaches should retrieve the most complete results:

These are errors in the raw data and the problem has been reported to the data providers.

Another change to the trademark data has been brought about due to the ability to file trademark applications online using TEAS from the USPTO Website. As of 2000 March 20, use of series code 75 for serial numbers has ceased and two new series codes have been created, based upon the method of filing the application:

Series code 75 indicates filing dates ranging from 1995-10-01 through 2000-3-20

Series code 76 indicates traditionally filed paper applications with filing dates ranging from 2000-3-20 to present

Series code 78 indicates electronically filed applications (TEAS) with filing dates ranging from 2000-3-20 to present

*A reminder: The Cassis product migration to DVD-ROM will be phased in and begin within the next 45 days. You will need a second-generation DVD drive in order to use these products. In addition, the migration to the Cassis2 user interface is imminent. Cassis2 will only run under the Windows 95/98 or NT operating systems.

2000 June 19