Hello, everyone, and welcome to our federal trademark searching webinar.
This is the first of two webinars that we're doing one today on October 2nd,
and the other is going to be on October 16th.
So both of these webinars are going to cover federal trademark searching.
But as you can see on the screen right now,
today is all about the basics. And we're talking very, very basic stuff.
I'm Jason Lott, the managing attorney for Trademarks Customer Outreach.
Along with me today is Mariessa Terrell, who's an attorney
on the team with me, along with three of our experts
whom you might have met in the past if you attended any of our previous demos
and other searching webinars.
We have Chris Doninger, Brett Golden, and Timothy Schimpf.
And so Mariessa and the guys are going to be in the Q&A box today
answering your questions as they come in while I'm handling the main presentation.
And then when we get to the end of the presentation,
we're going to be answering more questions. And who knows?
The guys might pop on screen and answer them there as well.
So very much wanted to welcome you to today's presentation.
Before we get going, just a couple of things to keep in mind.
There are a lot of you who are going to be joining us today.
So, you know,
there are over a thousand of you
who registered, so we might see some people coming in late
and so we might see repeat questions and things like that.
So please bear
with us as we handle questions that are coming in a little bit later.
So for those of you who are new to Webex, a couple of things to keep in mind.
So we're going to do a little bit of housekeeping right here.
So the main thing to know this is not Webex related,
but the main thing to know is that today's session is being recorded.
Those of you who attended some of the demos were asking. The answer for
the demos is no, but today's presentation is being recorded.
We'll post a recording in about three weeks to YouTube and to our site.
So if you haven't already subscribed to our YouTube channel (USPTO video),
please do so.
That'll notify you any time a USPTO video gets posted on YouTube.
So if you want a recording of today,
unfortunately you have to wait about three weeks,
but there will be one.
If you want a copy of the slides.
Well, those have been available and so you can also grab them now.
Our fantastic technician, Jay, is going to be posting those
into the chat here in Webex, so you can download them now if you didn't
grab them out of the emails that went out over the past couple of days.
They'll also be available to download after today's presentation.
So for those of you wondering about recordings, wondering about slides,
all of that is available to you, it'll just be at different time periods.
So for those of you who are new to Webex, you haven't used it before.
It's kind of similar to most virtual event platforms.
The main thing to keep in mind is that there are a couple of buttons you're going
to want to take a look at down to the bottom right-hand of your screen.
One of them is the chat bubble.
If you open up the chat bubble,
you will see that's where Jay is going to be posting links today, for example,
links to the slides and any other links that we wanted to distribute today.
That's also where you'll get the live captioning link.
If you're someone who wants live captioning,
just open that up and you can click the link
and that'll take you to the captioning.
For those of you who don't need live captioning, you're okay with a robot,
you can use the CC button that you see on your screen.
Keep in mind that the chat box is not how you communicate with us today.
Please, please, please don't put your questions into the chat.
Okay?
If you're going to ask us questions, please do so in the Q&A
box. To open up that look to the right of the chat box.
You'll see three little dots. Hit those dots.
It'll open up a thing that says Q&A.
You can hit that Q&A, open that up, and then you can ask your questions
to our experts in the Q&A box.
A couple of things to keep in mind with regard to Q&A.
There are a lot of you. We have four experts
who are going to be answering questions,
but please keep in mind as they continue to come in,
keep your questions short, as as short as you can so we can provide
quick answers, so we can answer as many questions as possible.
If you submit a question, there is no need to resubmit it.
Okay.
So it's not like it got lost somewhere.
We might not be able to answer all questions,
but resubmitting it doesn't necessarily help you.
So the guys and Mariessa
are going to be answering the questions today as quickly as they can.
Mariessa is also going to be keeping an eye on some questions
to ask me at the end, as well as the experts.
And it's not because they're not answered in the Q&A, but maybe
because we want to have a larger discussion about them.
So please feel free to ask your questions there.
And if you could please try and keep them relevant to today's topic,
which is about basics of federal trademark searching.
And I also wanted to let you know that a link to the slides and a link to a
survey are going to be ending up in your inbox in about 90 minutes.
Look for that. It's coming from Eventbrite and we want to know how today went.
If you have any feedback that you would like to give us, any advice
on ways we can do better or if you really enjoyed it, hey, let us know that too.
So you're going to be getting a link to a very quick five-minute survey
when today's presentation is over.
So that's it
with regard to the housekeeping.
So let's go ahead and move into a look at today's topics.
So I want to say this right now, we're about 5 minutes into it.
I know people do tend to come in a little bit later.
You're coming from meetings, you're coming from lunch,
you got all sorts of things going on.
I just want to make this very clear off the top.
Today's session is basics. Okay.
So if you are one of those experienced practitioners,
one of those experienced paralegals, you probably already know
a lot of the stuff we're going to be talking about today.
If you came to one of the demos a couple of weeks ago or the
"Transitioning from TESS to new search" webinar on September 19th,
you probably already know a lot of the things we're going to talk about today.
I want to be respectful of your time,
so if you're already good on the basics, you can go ahead
and feel free to clear out and then join us on October 16th.
You, of course, are welcome to stay.
But I also want to set expectations.
We're going to be talking through basics today.
As you can see,
we're going to talk about what a trademark is very, very briefly.
Okay.
We're going to talk about what likelihood of confusion is and the importance
of understanding likelihood of confusion.
We're going to talk through some of the basics of federal trademark
searching in terms of the basics of how to use the search system.
So if you feel like you're good on all of these things or you've read
through the basics tab in the search, the search system, you're probably okay.
So I don't want you to spend time when you could be doing other things.
But as always, you're welcome to come and hang out with us and ask your questions.
So before we dive in, just a couple of quick disclaimers,
as you know, we do not give legal advice.
And so today is all about information.
We want you to understand the mechanics of searching,
but we're not going to tell you how to do conduct
a complete, full, comprehensive, clearance search.
And so what we're going to talk about today does not include everything you need
to know about both federal and common law trademark rights.
All right.
So today is going to be very narrowly focused on what in the world
federal trademark searching actually is and the basics
of how you would start on that process.
Okay, so let's hit those trademark basics.
And the reason is
because sometimes there are those of you who are new to the practice area, right?
Maybe you're an attorney or paralegal.
You're just getting into the trademark game,
or maybe you're a business owner who's just starting out or, shoot,
maybe you're a business owner who's been in the business for 20 years
and you're like, "Yeah, I should look into this trademark thing."
Well, let's talk it through and make sure we're all clear on what a trademark
actually is.
So as you can see on the screen, what do we talk about
when we think about a trademark, legally, what we're thinking about is
is it something that identifies the source of goods and services.
Right.
That key is the is the connection between the trademark
itself, that brand name, the slogan, the logo,
and it identifying the source of very specific goods and services
and distinguishing them from the goods and services of another party.
The easiest example really is to think about the last time
you went to a restaurant, the waiter said," Hey, would you like something to drink?"
And you said, "Yes, I would love a Coke."
And he said, "Is a Pepsi okay?"
That is a trademark in action.
You are using the Coca-Cola trademark to indicate the source of the goods that
you want.
The waiter is using the Pepsi Cola trademark
to indicate the source of the goods they actually provide.
And both of those companies are using their trademarks
to distinguish their products from their competitors.
We see this every day in the marketplace,
whether it's shoes or jeans or coffee or cars
or tax accounting services or tax filing services, whatever it is.
We're all using these trademarks, these brand names,
these slogans, these logos to help us as consumers
identify who it is that we want to work with in the marketplace,
to identify which products it is that we want to buy in the marketplace.
So for you as the business owner or you as the attorney
who's representing that business owner, understanding that what a trademark is
and that it indicates the source of very specific goods and services is key.
Because in the end, one of the greatest driver of value
for a business is going to be a trademark.
You can create incredible value for your brand, for your business,
through your trademark.
And of course,
that means that you want to make sure you're protecting your trademark.
And one of the main ways that you protect
your trademark is through federal trademark registration.
So sometimes people get confused about it and they think, "Oh,
I got to go to the USPTO to get a trademark or to buy a trademark
or to find a trademark or to see which trademarks are available."
Nope, that's actually not how it works.
How it works is you have a trademark or your client has a trademark
and your client or you as the business owner decide, "You know what?
I have this thing that I use to indicate the source of my goods and services.
I want to register it with the USPTO."
And so you apply to register your trademark with us.
The thing to keep in mind, however, is
that not every trademark is registrable.
There are reasons why a
trademark can be refused registration.
There is this application process that you go through,
an examination process that your trademark goes through.
It gets assigned to a trademark examining attorney who's going to be looking
to see whether or not the trademark can move on to registration.
And I'll tell you right
now, as an examining attorney, because I was one for about ten years
when I first started here at the agency, you want that trademark to move forward.
You're not looking for reasons to reject it, but sometimes the situation
is that you do have to refuse registration of that trademark.
So that's something for you to keep in mind as that business owner
or as that attorney or that paralegal helping out on the case.
You want to keep that in mind.
"Hey, I want to make sure that this application is
in the prime shape of its life so we can move on to registration
and not be refused."
Because, remember, filing fees are not refundable.
They pay for the examination process.
Okay.
So it's important to understand that it isn't a thing where you say, "Hey,
I have my brand name, I now want it registered, here's my money.
Good to go, right?"
No, that's not how it works.
And instead what happens is this examination process.
And so what we're going to talk about right now is one of the main components
of that examination process, and that is this
concept of likelihood of confusion.
And there might be some of you who are like, "Likelihood of confusion.
Jason, what in the world are you talking about?
I thought you're going to be talking about searching.
I logged in for your webinar because I want to learn
how to use your search system."
Well, I'll tell you what.
You have to understand likelihood of confusion
in order to understand searching.
And I'll tell you right now,
in one of the webinars that we've done over the past couple of years,
I was doing a webinar on searching and somebody wrote in in the feedback
afterwards, "Oh,
I wish Jason hadn't spent so much time talking about likelihood of confusion.
I wish he'd talked about searching."
Well, that points out to me I didn't do a good enough job of helping
explain how likelihood of confusion is key in terms of searching.
You cannot search unless you understand likelihood of confusion.
And that's why we're going to spend the next couple of minutes
talking about this concept, because it's going to come into play
when you're doing your search
in our system. So
the concept of
likelihood of confusion is really about making sure that consumers
are not confused when they encounter two different things in the marketplace.
They're not confused about the source
of those goods or the source of those services
when you're out and about in the marketplace. Right?
So let's think about this, right?
I think we've all heard of something called, I don't know, Coca-Cola, right.
As a brand name for soft drinks.
So let's say that you decided, you know what, I'm going to brew up my own version
of a soft drink and I'm going to call mine Coca-Cola.
But instead of C-O-C-A-hyphen-
C-O-L-A, I'm going to spell mine with K's and Q's.
Right?
And let's say you do that, right, You get your stuff canned up
and bottled up and you put it in packaging and somehow you get it into the store.
It's sitting on the shelf right next to actual Coca-Cola.
A consumer comes along and like, "Well, there's the Coca-Cola that I usually get it over here.
There's this QOKA-QOLA.
It's cheaper.
Maybe I'm going to get that instead.
I guess they're doing some sort of promotion, right?"
We want to avoid that situation.
Well, certainly the Coca-Cola Bottling company wants to avoid that situation,
and you would want to avoid that too, if that happened to be your brand
that somebody was sort of playing upon and confusing customers
into thinking they're the same and then buying this other product.
That's what we're looking to avoid: confusing consumers
when they're encountering things in the marketplace.
And the way that we do that, that we try and help avoid this confusion
is when you apply to register your trademark with us.
We're going to conduct a test.
Now, it can be a pretty complex test with multiple factors, right?
But in many ways, a boils down to two main factors
that we're going to talk about today.
The first is we're going to ask the question, "Are these two trademarks
when we see them, confusingly similar?"
Right.
Think about COCA-COLA versus QOKA-QOLA, right?
Are they confusingly similar?
Do they look alike?
Or do they sound alike?
Or do they have a similar meaning?
Or maybe a similar commercial impression?
It doesn't have to be all of those.
It can just be one of those.
Okay.
So if you're looking at two different trademarks,
or you hear two different trademarks,
is it causing confusion?
Do they look alike? Sound alike? Have similar meaning?
If so, we're going to move on to the second part of the test and ask,
"Are these goods and services related?" Right.
Because remember that relationship between the trademark itself
and the underlying good and service is key.
Without that relationship, without it indicating the source
of specific goods and services, it's not a trademark.
All right.
We think Coca-Cola: soft drinks. McDonald's: hamburgers.
Nike: shoes. Ford: trucks. Apple: phones.
Right.
So we always have in our head
the connection between the trademark and the underlying good and service.
So here we're comparing trademarks and we're saying, "Uh oh. Boy, these sure
look alike.
Well, let me take a look at these goods and services and determine
if they're related."
Now, related does not mean different.
It does not mean identical. Right.
That's not the test.
That's not what we're looking for. Are these goods different?
Nope. That's not what we're asking.
All right. We're asking, are they related?
And what that really means is, from the customer's point of view,
are we as a consumer used to one company providing
both of these goods under the same brand name?
Are we used to one company or multiple companies
using a single brand to deliver both of these types of services?
Are these goods complementary or are they used together?
These are the sorts of things we're going to be thinking about when
we're trying to define what we mean by related.
Remember, there's no bright line rule here.
It's not always "if this, than this." We're going to always be looking at the evidence
to determine whether particular goods or services happen to be related.
All right.
So some of you sharp folks who are on today, you're probably thinking, "Huh.
Okay.
So, Jason, what I'm hearing here is you have to have a yes to the confusingly
similar trademarks and a and also to the related goods and services.
So that means if one of those is a no, it's no problem,
right?"
And the answer is, yeah, you're absolutely right.
Right.
If one of these is a no, there's probably not going to be
a likelihood of confusion, probably no refusal.
Let me give you an example.
If I said the trademark DOVE, what do you think of? Some of you
probably immediately thought chocolate, Some of you immediately thought soap and
that's right.
Both of the trademarks, DOVE
co-exists in the marketplace with another DOVE
because the goods that they come with or are used with are unrelated.
We're not used to one company using a singular trademark
for both chocolate and soap. Right.
Or DOVE for ice cream bars and DOVE for soap.
Right.
So they can co-exist in the marketplace.
Think about DELTA, right?
We know multiple trademarks that are DELTA trademarks
and they all co-exist because they're used
with goods and services that are unrelated.
DELTA for airline services, DELTA for plumbing fixtures, DELTA
for a moving company, DELTA for dental services.
Right.
They all coexist.
And that's okay because as consumers, we're not used to a company
providing airline services,
also providing the plumbing fixtures that we buy at our local hardware store.
Okay.
So this concept of likelihood of confusion is key because this enters
into the analysis that we do when we're using the search system.
And the reason that this is important is because
when you apply to register your trademark with us,
as I noted, the examining attorney is going to examine your application.
She is going to look in our database and she's going to look to see
is there a trademark in there that is confusingly similar?
Right.
And in addition, is that is that similar looking trademark
also used with goods and services that are related to yours?
And if so, she's going to have to issue a refusal.
If one of these bullets is a no, hey, no problem there.
There could be other issues, but no problem here
were likelihood of confusion.
So it's important that you understand and know what's in our database.
That's what searching in our database is all about.
Right?
Trying to look in advance to see if the examining attorney
might have a reason that she has to refuse registration.
So sometimes it's helpful to do a little bit
of a little hypothetical
to try and see, make sure we understand the concept.
So I'm going to run
through a couple of hypotheticals and then I'm going to ask you a knowledge check.
Okay. So for those of you who like polling, get ready.
There's one coming up here in a little bit.
Okay, get your fingers ready. Okay.
So let's say that we as an as a group right here,
all of us together, we decided, "Hey, we're going to form our own company
and we're going to register T.MARKEY as a brand name for shirts."
And so we apply to register T.MARKEY as a brand name for shirts.
Examining attorney looks in the database, and she discovers
there's something already registered that's T.MARKEY brand for pants.
Is that going to be a problem?
Well, we do the analysis.
Is T.MARKEY similar to T.MARKEY?
Yes, they're identical.
It doesn't have to be, but they are.
And so then we ask the question, are shirts related to pants?
Well, I think we all know the answer to that is yes.
And there's going to be plenty of evidence
that companies that do, you know, shirts also do pants.
Right. And they're going to sell them under the same brand name.
Think your Lee's and your Levi's
and your Nike's and your Reeboks and your Adidas and whatever.
Clothing companies are using the same brand on shirts that they are on pants.
So here shirts and pants are going to be considered related.
So in this case, the examining attorney would refuse registration
of our trademark.
Let's tweak that hypothetical a little bit.
Let's say we apply to register
T.MARKEY as a brand name for shirts the examining attorney discovers
in the database TEE MARQEE has been registered for pants.
Is this a problem?
Well, again, we do
the analysis. Is T.MARKEY similar to
TEE MARQEE? Yes, right.
They might not look alike, but they sound alike.
And so these are similar.
And we already know that shirts and pants are related.
So again, there would be a likelihood of confusion.
Let's change up that analysis one more time.
So we apply to register
T.MARKEY as a brand name for shirts.
Examining attorney discovers TEE MARQEE has been registered for golf flags.
Is this going to be a problem?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Right.
So we're going to do the analysis. T.MARKEY similar to TEE MARQEE? Yes,
but are shirts related to golf flags?
I got to be honest with you, I don't know.
All right.
If I was the examining attorney, I would absolutely be doing research
to determine whether there are companies out there using the same brand name
for shirts as they are for their golf flags or in reverse.
There's a golf flag company that is also using their same
brand for a for a line of shirts.
Okay, now, look, I don't know the answer to the question, right?
So we'd have to figure that out.
Probably
there are not a lot of golf flag companies out there
that also have a brand of shirts that they're doing.
Probably not, but we would just need to do some research to find out.
And that's because, the reason I raise that, is because
that's also research that you can do before you file.
All of this stuff is stuff that you can do before
you file, because remember, there's no refund of your filing fee.
So if you want to save yourself 250 bucks at a minimum,
you can do all of this work before you actually file.
Okay. So now it's time for the knowledge check.
So, Jay, if you could. If you could throw that first poll out there, we'll see.
So the folks you know, I should maybe I should mention
this off the top sometimes there's some issues if you're on mobile,
okay, with doing a poll,
you might run into some problems. Most of you on desktop should be okay.
But here in this case, look, there's some people answering already.
I love it. Okay.
So let's say that we as a group decided we were going to register
TRAQ as a brand name for racquetball rackets.
But we remembered, oh, I went to the searching webinar.
Let's look into the database first.
And we look in the database and we discover
there's already a registration for TRAK for snow skis.
And so we're doing this analysis that a ton of you are already doing.
Oh, that's amazing.
Love it.
And so we're going to do: is TRAQ similar to TRAK?
Yeah, right.
They they don't they kind of look alike, but they certainly sound alike.
And so the trickier bit is are racquetball rackets related to snow skis?
And I see some of you are answering "no."
Hey, you know, I get it right.
The question is, are there sporting good companies that are out there
that are making racquetball rackets and also making snow skis?
And again, this would be research based.
It's going to be evidence based.
And I'll tell you in this case, those of you who are answering "yes" right
now, you would be in agreement with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board
who determined "yes." At that time, in 1981,
there was evidence
that manufacturers of racquetball rackets are also the manufacturers of snow skis,
or that the consuming public is going to assume that these are related.
So in this case, this would be a refusal.
So if we were TRAQ, T-R-A-Q, we might decide, oh,
maybe we should think about a different trademark
because we're
not going to be able to register it
because there's already TRAK registered for these snow skis.
So great job on this poll.
Thank you, Jay. You can close that out.
But you know, for those of you who said "no," hey, I'm with you,
this really underscores the difficulty
that we sometimes encounter when we're doing this searching.
As I said, it is not a bright line rule.
There is no "if this, then this," right.
If racquetball rackets, therefore, it must be related to snow skis.
In this case, it turns out there was evidence that it was, right.
But it might be
the evidence is not there, in which case the two of them could coexist.
So really, it depends on you
figuring out that similarity and you figuring out that relatedness.
Now, I want to say one thing real quick with regard to relatedness
before we move on to different parts of searching.
One thing that you will see right here is there is nowhere listed on this slide
or in any of the examples, a classification number
for where those goods or those services happen to appear.
And the reason I raise this right here is because sometimes people say, "Huh,
okay, so if I can. I register TRAQ like in this one class,
sometimes people call them categories, and somebody can else register
the same trademark in this other class or category over here."
That's not the analysis. Okay?
That is not how likelihood of confusion is figured out.
It's not based on, "Hey, your goods are in this class, your goods are in this class.
You're okay." That is not how it works.
It is always based upon the relatedness of the specific
goods and specific services.
Okay.
So we can talk about that a little bit later
on when we're talking about filtering down and things like that.
But I just want to make sure I'm highlighting that here, because sometimes
there is that misconception that out of the 45 international classes,
somebody could have, like you could have 45 different folks,
each kind of like owning it in different classes.
Nope, that is not how it works.
And that's because you will find that
goods and services are related across classes.
It's not a numbers game, okay?
It's all based upon the specific language in your application and in
the registration.
All right.
So very briefly,
let's let's talk about what in the world comprehensive clearance searching is.
So we want to look at it big picture most of the time
to do a full on comprehensive clearance search
you're going to hire an experienced trademark attorney to do it for you.
Right.
And that's because your search is going to include not just our database,
but you're also going to want to look in state
databases, business name registries, foreign trademark databases, the Internet.
You're also going to want to probably
look at domain name registries and things like that, a whole bunch of other sources
that are out there that I can't even think of in the moment.
And that's because you want to have a big picture idea
of what trademarks are already being used out there
and the goods and services that they're being used with.
Okay, you want to have this awareness, the situational awareness
of all of these other things that are going on to make sure
that you're not going to cause confusion with those.
Is that easy?
No, not necessary, really. Right.
And that's why hiring an experienced trademark attorney is sometimes
a really great idea, because that attorney has been doing it for a while.
They can probably go through the search much more quickly than you can.
They inherently now understand likelihood of confusion.
Right?
So we often recommend working with an experienced trademark attorney
because they can bring those years of experience to the project, right.
To that problem. Right. That's why you hire them.
But I get it. For some of you are like, "Hey, Jason, I don't want to do that.
I want to do it on my own."
Hey, cool. That's fine.
If you're domiciled here in the United States, that's not a problem.
You can do it yourself. You can represent yourself before the office.
So just be aware.
It can be a pretty big thing to do.
At a very least, though, if you want to do it on your own,
there are two things that we do recommend.
One would be looking in our database
because that's where your federal refusal would come from,
from something inside our database.
And we also recommend that you look online.
You want to look for those common law trademark rights that are out there,
right?
Somebody who hasn't registered their trademark with our office,
which means there's nothing in the database. Right.
But they still have strong trademark rights.
And that's because trademark rights in the United States are based on use.
And there's no requirement that you register with us.
So it's quite possible somebody is out there, never registered their trademark
with us, but have very strong common law trademark rights,
and they could pop up and potentially file an opposition
or eventually a cancellation against you if you were to move on to registration.
So at a very least, folks, if you're out there,
if you want to do this on your own, okay, cool.
Go for it. Right.
But please make sure you're at least checking these two things, our database
and also looking online for those common law trademark rights.
Okay, so let's say that you say, "Okay, Jason,
I do want to do this on my own.
I want to look in your database." Okay, cool.
So I want to show
you real quick demonstration of how you could go about that.
All right.
So let's say that you wanted to register
RABBIT as a brand name for your racquetball rackets.
So you decided TRAK no good because of those snow skis.
So therefore, I'm going to register RABBIT as a brand name for racquetball rackets.
So here is what you would do.
I am going to show you my screen here.
Hey, let me bump this up one more time.
Just make it a little bit bigger. Okay?
This is our homepage.
This is USPTO.gov.
And so there are multiple ways you could kind of get to searching.
Typically, we always use "Find it fast" up here on the right-hand side.
TESS over here is going to be going away very soon.
Let's see what happens if we click it.
I'm not sure what it goes to.
Okay. Yeah. We don't want to do that.
I should have checked that beforehand.
So what I'm going to recommend right now anyway is you hover over "Trademarks" up
here on the megamenu at the top and in the second column is this thing
"Searching trademarks" under "Application process."
Go ahead and click that link.
It's going to bring you to the searching page.
As you can see right now, we're kind of still in a beta phase
with this new version of our searching system.
I don't know if it's officially a beta or not.
It's out there right now.
So here, let me
reload that thing.
Okay, so this is what our search system
looks like, the newer version of our search system.
So let's say you wanted to search for RABBIT.
What you would do is you would type of the word in, pretty self-explanatory.
But before you search, here's what I would recommend.
Instead of searching by all, you would instead select "wordmark"
because you're going to look for a trademark.
Let me just define this a little bit more.
If you do "search by all" this means this is looking in
every single little corner of our database.
Do you need to do that if you're doing a search for a trademark?
No, because what that will pull otherwise is if it's in someone's name
or that like the owner name or maybe they live at 123
Rabbit Drive, is that going to be a problem in your trademark search?
No, it doesn't matter what street they happen to be on.
What matters is the trademarks.
Okay? So if you're going to do a trademark search,
what you'd want to do is move over here to the wordmark search,
and then you'd hit the button, or you probably just hit
enter and it's going to get you your results.
Now, this is what it kind of looks like, right?
You can see right now we have oh, wow, almost 2000 results for RABBIT.
So here's the deal, folks.
As you can see, our first two tiles up here, they say "dead" and "cancelled."
If something is dead in our database, it is not going to be cited against you
because the application or registration is no longer moving forward.
It's no longer active in our database.
It would not be a cite.
So what you could do is go over here on the left-hand side,
deselect where it says "dead," and all of those will go away.
And so now you're down to 781.
Hey, that's a lot of trademarks to look through.
Okay.
So when we get a little
deeper into searching, we'll talk about how to filter things down.
But that's a quick and easy way to make sure you're only looking at live
marks is to go ahead and turn off the dead.
So once you get your, you get this down to the stuff
you want to look at, here's what you would do.
Remember our "looking at trademarks, looking at goods and services."
Same thing here. You're going to register RABBIT,
you would look at this, huh,
this one right here says RABBIT RABBIT.
Could that be a problem?
RABBIT RABBIT versus RABBIT.
Yeah, that's potentially a problem.
So maybe there's similarity in the trademarks.
Let's think about what the goods and services are.
We want to register for racquetball rackets.
We can see right here for barber services.
Hair care services.
ANd we can expand this a little bit to look more what they have:
hair care, haircutting, hair styling.
Right.
Do people who who manufacture
racquetball rackets also do barbering and hair care services?
Typically not. Right.
So we might assume, hey, this one's not going to be a problem for me.
Let's move on to the next one.
We look at this one RABBIT RABBIT over here for bubble
tea and coffee shops and probably coffee and tea bars.
There you go. Yeah.
Mobile cafe. Is that going to be a problem for us, you know, probably not.
Right.
Those are probably unrelated.
We move down here. RABBIT RABBIT.
Okay.
Still, that could be a problem for leggings, shirts, tank tops, and t-shirts.
Could that be a problem for us?
Hey, maybe. We would want
to do some research to find out if sporting goods manufacturers also do
a brand name of shirts, leggings, tank tops.
Could that be a problem? Maybe. Right.
We look over here, there's MILKI RABBIT.
Also for appears to be more clothing, different things.
That'd be a problem potentially. Right.
So we kind of would move through. Hey,
somebody who
does racquetball rackets, also do table syrups and molasses?
Probably not. Rabbit feed, probably not.
Right.
So we would go through and do that analysis for all of these
because remember, we're comparing our trademark to what we see in the database.
And we're also looking to see are these goods and services related.
So that's the basics of how we implement likelihood
of confusion analysis into our search of the database.
All right.
So I'm going to jump back here into the PowerPoint.
So what I've included in here for you are just screenshots
of the things that we just did.
Oh, yeah.
Here, let me show you this real quick.
So you're not just limited to this.
So if you wanted to look a little bit deeper into one of these cases,
you could go ahead and click on the link there.
Click on the actual mark itself.
And that's going to open up the Trademark Status and Document Retrieval system.
And so you can see more things about the trademark itself.
Let me bump the size of this up a little bit so it's not so small.
You can see. Oh, yeah. Uh huh.
That was the trademark: RABBIT RABBIT.
We can look over here at the goods and services.
Yeah, I can see right here.
That's for barber, hair care, things like that.
So TSDR is the place you want to go to find out all sorts of information
about the status of the application or registration.
You know, there's more information about the mark itself.
If you want to look up design codes and things like that.
So this is a great resource for you to learn more about a potential
cite that might be out there.
Okay.
So, so you learn more about the potential conflict.
Okay, so I've just put these screenshots in here.
So later on down the line, when you're, when you've got the PDF of these slides,
and you're like, "Oh, what was Jason talking about?
What did you do next?"
Instead, you can kind of just flip to the slides
and you can kind of see the screenshot of how that would happen.
All right, so Jay let's launch that second poll here.
And so here's a question for you folks.
Does a search of the database guarantee that your trademark
is federally registrable? All right.
So there are some things we haven't necessarily talked about here.
Oh, my goodness.
You guys are rushing it right now with all of your "no"s.
Yeah, that is exactly right.
A search of the USPTO database does not guarantee
that your trademark is federally registrable.
But it might be that there's no likelihood of confusion, cool,
but it might be that there are other issues which would mean
your trademark would be refused registration.
It also could be maybe your search was incomplete.
Maybe you didn't do everything
that you needed to do
and something was still in the database and you didn't find it.
So just because you did a search you thought was okay,
it doesn't mean it actually is.
And there might still be something that causes your application to be refused.
Or it could be
this too. Is that you do your search and then in the next 10 to 15 minutes,
however long it takes you to go from search
to actually filling out the application and actually submitting it,
somebody else slips in front of you, right? Now,
does that happen very often?
No, probably not. Probably not. Right.
But it is something to think about. You're like, "Hey, I just did a search.
15 minutes later I apply and someone came in in between."
I will tell you early on in my career, I've, so it's only happened once
in my entire career
where two people had registered
confusingly similar trademarks on the exact same day.
And so we eventually had to go down and look and see what time
they came in to determine who was actually first in the door.
It's pretty rare that that's going to happen
where you're going to have applications being submitted on the exact same day,
but it can happen.
So those of you who answered no, boom, nailed it.
Thank you very much. Jay. Go ahead and close that one out.
You're absolutely right.
A search of a database does not guarantee it's registrable,
but it is highly encouraged because likelihood of confusion
is one of the main ways or main reasons why
trademarks are refused registration at our office.
All right, so let's move on and let's dig a little bit deeper in what we mean
by word mark searching. Okay.
So I was just kind of first gave you kind of an overview of how the system works.
So let's talk a little bit more about like how this would work.
So let's say that you wanted to register ZEBRA as a brand name for T-shirts, okay?
And so you decide, okay, I am going to do a search of the database.
Jason said that I should, so I'm going to do okay.
So what would that look like?
Well, there are multiple ways to approach searching.
So what
we're going to talk through right now is just one of many ways to approach it.
This is sometimes referred to as like a pyramid, um, approach to searching
where you start very, very narrow and then you widen out as you go.
You could think about it as a reverse funnel, for example.
Okay?
And the reason that we often recommend starting off with a dead-on search
is because, look,
if there's one thing
that's out there that's going to cause a problem
and you want to find it quick, a dead-on search is the way to do it.
Okay?
Because you might discover, hey, I'm going to look and see.
"Oh, man, there's one registration.
It's also ZEBRA for t-shirts."
Okay.
I don't have any reason to go any deeper.
I don't have any reason to do any more searching for this trademark.
I'm going to move on to something else because that one's
never going to register.
So doing that dead-on search
sometimes called a knock out search is a great way to start.
So one way that you could do it
is let's see, we'll go back to a we'll go back to the home here.
Okay.
So one thing that you could do is just type in ZEBRA, right, as a word mark,
and see what you get.
All right.
That's pretty well dead-on, right?
We can get rid of the dead and
so you got, what, 256, actually.
You know what? That's not too bad. I know that seems high.
I know it does.
But as an examination attorney, you're absolutely looking through 200 plus,
right?
If there's two to 300 on one search strategy,
you're probably going to look through them and then you're going
to have other search strategies that might also have 200, 300, whatever.
You're going to look through a whole lot of trademarks.
So this is actually not bad.
And you would kind of go through and you look to see ZEBRA versus
ZEBRA REFLEXIS, t-shirts versus downloadable computer software.
ZEBRA versus ROCKIN' ZEBRA, one for t-shirts, one for toy vehicles.
Right.
So you would kind of again, go through that analysis to do this
sort of dead-on type of search, this dead-on searching.
Okay.
That's one way to go about it. Some of you might say, "Hey, you know what?
Actually, I want to look for ZEBRA or ZEBRAS,
because maybe there's more than one zebra.
I'll show you real quick here.
One thing that you could do is just add a little asterisk at the end, all right?
And that's going to tell the search to say, "Don't just bring me ZEBRA,
but bring me infinite characters that are attached to the end of ZEBRA."
And you could do that.
Let's see what happens.
Oh, we're still getting 256.
Okay. So not a whole lot of extra zebras in here, I guess.
Or maybe it was already pulling them as it is sometimes wont to do.
Okay.
So that's one thing that you could do with regard to your dead-on search.
All right.
So that's the quick and easy way to go about it.
What I'm going to show you right now is a way for you to do,
start to creep towards some more advanced level searching.
Okay.
I know today is all about basics, but what I want to do is introduce you
in the
foundational building blocks of ways to create more complex
searches so it's not just "type in word and hit enter."
Okay, so here's what one way you could go about
your dead-on search.
You could do something
which is going to introduce you to this more advanced searching.
So you're not just using the blue box that you see there.
You're typing in some programming language.
All right. To go a little deeper.
So as you can see here, what I have on the screen is CM, colon, ZEBRA.
And as you can see, CM is in all caps.
So the CM is a field code for combined
mark. So what this is doing is it is telling the search system, "Hey,
search system, I want you to look in
very specific buckets in the database.
I want you to look in the trademark bucket.
I want you to look in the what's called pseudo mark bucket.
So it's kind of like some of the misspellings
and stuff that are out there, you know, alternate ways of searching.
I want you to look in that bucket
and I want to look have you look in the translation bucket.
So things that have been previously translated
and put into the into the database, I want you to look in there, too."
So that's the combined mark field.
"Hey, search. Go look at all those buckets.
And I want you to look for the word ZEBRA in all of those buckets."
Okay.
So as you can see, that field tag goes in all caps.
Your search term goes next to it in lowercase.
All right.
So let's take a look at what that looks like.
And again, we're going to be ignoring what we see in the blue over here.
And instead we're just going to say CM, colon, ZEBRA.
What I'm also going to do is turn on the expert mode down here.
And you can tell you're an expert mode because you'll see "expert mode"
right up here. Okay.
So we did that same search. We're still getting our same results.
All right. So there's no real difference here.
It might be
you might see a little difference in how they return,
but you're going to get essentially get the same ones.
All right. So that's going to be your dead-on search.
You would go through ZEBRA versus ZEBRA REFLEXIS. ZEBRA versus
ROCKIN' ZEBRA. ZEBRA versus HOME ZEBRA. ZEBRA versus HOPPIN' ZEBRA.
And so forth.
All right.
So that's one way to go.
And you go through and you're like, "Cool, I got it.
None of these are a problem for me, but I'm not done yet.
I want to keep on looking."
So you might execute what's called an expanded search.
So here you're not just looking for the word ZEBRA,
you're looking for stuff on either side of ZEBRA.
And the way that you would do that is you would put forward slashes
around the word ZEBRA, because this is
what's telling the search system, "Hey, search system.
I want to do some funky stuff with my trademark search."
And so the way you do it is you put it in between two forward slashes.
Now, you can see next to it is something that we call a "dot star."
And we see the dot star on either side of the word ZEBRA.
And what that is doing is it is telling the system,
look for infinite characters to the left and right of the word ZEBRA.
All right.
So we have ZEBRA right here.
We're going to put it inside
its little basket.
Okay. It's a little forward slash basket.
See we've got it right here.
And so what we're going to do now is we're going to put in a period
and an asterisk on either side. Period.
Asterisk.
And this is going to tell the search system to look in infinite
direction to the left and to the right of the word ZEBRA.
And we hit that and we're going to see what we have.
256 before.
Look at this. We now have 300.
Okay.
And so, again, we might want to look through and see what's in here.
Now, I'll tell you this right now, I'm going to I'm
going to jump ahead with one of my little pro tips right here.
Let's say you looked through all 256 before. This is getting these 300.
Do you want to look through the 40?
Would you rather look at 300? Or just through 44
since you've already looked through 256?
Right.
It's probably going to be easier for you if you've already looked through 256
to only look through 44 more instead of looking at stuff you already looked at.
So what you might do, because you are in
expert mode,
is you could click on the box right here
and you can see this previous one was number four, search number four.
What you could do is you could say, "I want search four
and not search string three."
And if I'm doing this correctly.
Oh, okay.
Interesting.
Maybe. I'm not sure why that happened.
Maybe it's because I did it. A different thing here.
But anyway, so I would have thought it would have brought 44, but it didn't.
I'm sure Tim or Chris or Brett will tell me what I did wrong,
but essentially it's notted out the things that you've already looked at.
And so you can go through and look at what you see here.
FLAGZEBRA. MINIZEBRA. VLIONZEBRA.
DAZEBRA. ECOZEBRA. and things like that.
Okay.
So once you do that expanded search,
you can you can not-out things you've already looked at
because after you do the expanded,
you might want to think about an alternate spelling search as well.
So that would be something
like what are the different ways that we might spell ZEBRA.
So what you can see right here on the screen
is we're using an "or" operator to tell the search system,
give me stuff that is spelled ZEBRA with a Z, and also stuff that's spelled
ZEBRA with an S for SEE-BRA or SEH-BRA, however you want to pronounce it.
Okay.
So what you could do up here is let's ex that out.
And let's say we would do CM
here and we would do our dot star,
zebra, dot star, and then close out
the little basket. "OR."
And then we put in our little basket dot star
SEBR- oops
dot star, close out the basket, put it all inside a parens.
Okay.
And so this is going to find us anything that's spelled ZEBRA with a Z
and SEBRA with an S.
Then we hit that and we get some 309.
Okay,
So we're going to see what we had like 300 before without the spelling of the S.
All right.
So we can see there's probably nine different marks in here.
They're probably spelled with an S instead of a Z.
And if you wanted not things out, you could.
That's an easier way to do it.
But as you can see here, we have a SEBRA spelled with an S instead of a Z.
And so we would again do that analysis.
ZEBRA versus ZEBRA or SEBRA.
Right. Probably pretty similar.
And then we have t-shirts versus foam mats for use
on play areas, carpets, rugs, things of this.
Oh, wow.
They've got all kinds of different things in here, right?
So not just mats, but furniture, lunchboxes, bed linens, games and toys.
So this might be something we'd want to think about as a potential problem for us.
Okay.
So that's how that would work.
Now, some of you might say, "Jason,
that's fine and everything, but that seems like it's going to take a very long time
to type out every single possible alternate spelling of the word ZEBRA."
What if it's, you know, S- or, I'm sorry, Z-E-E-B-R-A
or S-Z-E-B-R-A or something like that?
Yeah, that could take you a very long time.
So here's one thing I want to introduce you
to for those of you who used TESS in a previous life
than you are already aware of some of these things called pattern
matching and truncation and wild cards and stuff like that.
So this is a way that you can use that same sort of pattern matching
to help make things a little bit easier for you.
So as you can see, we're still using that CM for our combined mark bucket
with a colon, and then we put it inside the forward slash basket.
But instead of spelling ZEBRA different ways,
instead what we're doing is we're using this pattern matching
to tell the system, "Find me one instance of an s or one instance of a z."
So instead of spelling out all these alternate spellings
dah dah dah or dah dah dah or dah dah dah or dah dah dah
or, we're going to take care of it right here in one search string.
And as you can see, it's put inside the square little brackets there: S or Z.
So it's telling the search system, bring me an S or bring me a Z.
And after that you can see an E,
and after that are the
curly braces with one comma three.
What that's doing, it's a quantifier.
So it is telling the search system, bring me one,
two, or three Es right here.
I don't care. You can bring me one.
You can bring me two. You can bring me three.
All right.
So this is going to get us an alternate spelling with Z-E-B-R-A,
S-E-B-R-A, S-E-E-B-R-A, S-E-E-B-R-A.
Right. You get it, right.
So it's it's quantifying what comes right before it.
So the curly brackets are saying,
"Bring me one, two, or three of the character that comes right before it."
And the last thing I'll say here is if you look at this, you'll notice
I chopped off the A, and the reason I did that is because we have our dot star.
What do we know about a dot star?
It's looking infinite in that direction.
So that means we don't need to put the A on there
because the dot star is going to bring us an A.
It also might bring us another R or another letter.
We don't know what's going to bring us, but this is a great way to sort of like
chop off a little bit of the end so you're not stuck
and you're missing things that might still be a problem
and you missed it because you still have that A in there at the very end.
Okay.
So let me type that in for you. See what we get.
All right.
I'm going to erase this right here
and we are going to do something
like dot star and we're going to do an S or a Z, right, for that ZEE.
Oops. Hold on.
And then we're going to say an E and then give me one, two, or three
of the E, B, R, and then we hit a dot star
and then we close out our little basket there.
Oops, that's not what I want.
I want this guy. Okay, here we go. And that's going to spell us,
bring us all these alternate spellings of the word ZEBRA.
So we had 309 this other way. Let's see what we get here.
Bet it's going to be more.
Yeah, 406, right?
So you're probably going to see some stuff that doesn't apply to you, right?
BRICK HOUSE BREWERY.
What in the world? Right.
So how did that come about?
So probably because we have the S, the E, the B, the R, right.
So for the, the S-E-B in BRICKHOUSEBREWERY, that's why we're seeing it.
But we're also seeing our DUKE ZEBRA and other zebras and things like that.
So again, this would be a situation where we might want to do
"7 AND NOT 6"
if we had looked at search string six already
and we're going to come down to 97. Hey, that's going to be a little bit
easier to go through.
And so we can look through ZEBRUX.
Ooh, that could be a problem.
You know, these are not a problem, stuff like that.
So you can probably scroll a little bit easier through those.
Okay.
That's the basics of how you kind of do this pyramid-type search.
So knowledge check for you.
Okay. So, Jay, you can go ahead and launch poll number three there.
So let's say that we decided we wanted to register
PEPZI for soft drinks.
Which of these strategies do you think would find you more potential cites
if you just did "combined mark PEPZI" or the one down there at the bottom?
Now my guess is probably all of you are like, "Jason, that's super easy."
Yeah, it is pretty straightforward.
And the reason that I'm pointing this out is because I don't want you
to get caught in the trap of just like typing a very specific word,
hitting enter, and seeing what pops up. Because it is quite possible,
let's see what happens here
if we were to just do CM:PEPZI.
No results found, right?
So if you're like, "Sweet, I want to register PEPZI
as a brand name for soft drinks. I just did a quick search.
There's nothing in there.
I'm good to go, right?"
No, not at all.
Pepsi Cola is going to want to have something to say about that.
Right?
The examining attorney assigned to your case is going to do
some sort of search that is probably going to find.
Right. Something like that.
And guess what? You even did you a little tiny change like that.
You're going to find all these potential cites
of PEPSI, PEPSI PRODUCTIONS, PEPSI MUSIC LAB, all that sort of stuff.
Okay.
So that is why when you're doing this sort of search, it's so important
that you think beyond just a quick little knock-out of just that exact wording
and you look into what is this pattern matching
sort of stuff that I can do to look for alternate spellings of my trademark.
Okay, good stuff, everybody.
Wow. It looks like a lot of you nailed nailed that one.
So good good job.
All right.
So real quick here, let's I'm going to run
pretty quickly through these so we can get to your questions.
But let's say it's not just one word,
but you want to register something like two words, right?
You've got a two-word mark, something like ZEBRASTAR.
You want to register for t-shirts,
You would do all those things we've already talked about, you know, a
dead-on search, you know, ZEBRASTAR inside quotes, right.
You would do you could do something like
something like that.
Right. Okay.
So you'd do that sort of thing.
You might try all the different spellings, the expanded search, things like that.
So, you know, as we see here ZEBRASTAR and put it inside the basket.
Right. With little dot stars on either side.
So it's looking an infinite ways on either side of ZEBRASTAR.
You could spell it like this, like we did.
We've the longer way of doing it.
One line is ZEBRA spelled that way.
One line is STAR spelled that way.
Or here's the super fancy way to do it.
You could do like our pattern matched version of ZEBRA.
You could also do a combined of STAR, right.
Or like this sort of thing.
So instead you did something like,
oops,
like, I did did that wrong.
Here we go, something like that, you know, So that's going to find you
all the different spellings of STAR with an S or with a Z.
Okay. So that's that's a possibility.
And what what you could do is, you know, look through all the ZEBRA marks
and then look through all the STAR marks
and then what we would recommend is you might want to try combining two of them.
So one would be to do something like this where you're pattern matching
ZEBRA and STAR all together in one.
So you could do something like
this.
Sorry.
Let's see here.
Okay.
Well, that's not right.
Yeah, here we go.
So this is going to look for the word ZEBRA spelled all sorts of different ways.
It's going to look for the word STAR spelled all sorts of different ways.
So it's going to find anything that has the word ZEBRA and the word STAR in it.
Okay.
We got one here, SELLING FLORIDA WORLDWIDE.
Okay.
So these sort of like different spellings of ZEBRA and the word STAR.
So that's one way you could go about it if you wanted to.
The other option would be to do your fancy searches like this.
Right.
Pattern matching here on one line, pattern matching there on the next line,
and then you do one and two.
So much
in the same way that we were doing an "AND NOT" to not-out things from before,
you can do the same thing here by executing different searches.
Right. So if we did
this on one line, okay,
and then we get our results and then we also do
this on the next line,
we can say, "Okay, I want to put together."
That's weird.
I think it was 14 and 15,
right.
And we get the same result.
All right.
So it's going to execute those things.
You can just tell it,
"Do this search string again and this search string again and put them together."
So that's a possibility.
So so you can start to see once, you know, the sort of basic blocks
of how to use this, you can just use very simple things
like a little logical operator like that to combine two things together.
Very briefly, I want to touch on design mark searching, because there are
those of you who are out there who are like, "Hey, I have a logo.
Jason, I have a design.
What do I do here?"
Okay, so let's say that this was you.
You had this ZEBRA STAR logo
you wanted to register as your logo for a t-shirt.
How would you go about doing that?
Now, some of you had said, and I, because I've seen it in the feedback
and in suggestions for the new search system,
you want the ability to sort of like drag and drop your logo
into our system and say, "Go search. Find me things that are similar."
And those of you
who have used a reverse image search on Google or other sorts of things
are like, "Hey, I would love to have that as an option here."
Hey, we're with you.
That would be pretty awesome.
We don't have that capability at the moment.
Certainly open to it, it's certainly something that I'm sure the developers
are probably working on in the background, but we don't have it yet.
Okay.
If that's something that you want,
you wanted the ability to sort of upload and search like that.
Please, please, please, let us know.
I'm going to show you the feedback button before we get out of here today.
Please include that in the feedback. Okay.
So the more data we get in the feedback, the better we can improve our system.
If you want the ability to reverse image search,
things like that, please, please, please, let us know.
All right.
So at the moment, we've got an old school way of doing it
right, which involves looking up a design code.
So for those of you unfamiliar with design codes,
every single logo
or sort of trademark that you see in our database
that has some sort of design element to it,
every little thing is going to get its own six-digit code.
Okay.
So what we see on the screen right now, we see a five-point start.
We also see a zebra.
Each of those elements in the logo are going to have their own particular
design code.
So what you can do is once you know that design code,
you can search for that particular six-digit number
and you can look for all of the times that that six-digit code
appears in our database and pull up all the trademarks.
So therefore, if you're going to look up
if you looked up the six-digit code for a zebra, you type that in, you're
going to get all of the trademarks that are coded with a zebra.
All right.
So how do you do that? Well, don't worry.
You do not have to have them memorized. I'll tell you right now,
I do not have them memorized and I've been working here for over 20 years.
Okay?
The folks in our pre-exam unit, they might have them memorized.
They very well might, but most of us mortals do not.
And so what you do is you look up the code in our Design Search Code Manual.
All right?
And I'll show you where to find that as well.
You can just look it up.
You can use the keyword search and say "zebra,"
and it'll tell you what the six-digit code is.
So I've done the work for you here, and I already looked it up.
So zebras are coded as 030503 and single point stars.
Single stars with five points are 010103.
Right. So once you have those codes, maybe, you know,
jot them down so you have them handy and
then you're going to input those
into the search system by executing a design code search.
As you can see here, this field tag is DC.
All right, that's design code, right?
So it's going to look in the bucket
in our database that are just these design codes.
It's going to look in the bucket for
030503 to get our zebras.
And also you could execute a search to look
for 010102 to look for those five-point stars.
So we could do that if we wanted to
right here. Again we're ignoring what we see here in the blue
there is I think one of the dropdowns is for design code.
But I want you to start thinking advanced already.
Okay.
030503, right.
Let's see. That should give us our zebras.
Yeah. Look at this.
We get 161 zebras. And the other was 010105, I think.
Right.
So we see, as we can see here, there's some things with five-point.
Did I do that, right?
010103.
That's what I wanted. Sorry. Sorry about that, folks.
010103.
That's our five-point star. Okay.
So we can see if we were if we wanted to, we could,
we could if we wanted to look through all the five-point stars, we could do that
if we wanted to look through all of the zebras
here, we could do this,
you know, looking through to see if it's
similar to ours for our t-shirts.
And if you wanted to combine them all,
you could. Right. So we could say 17
and what was it, 19.
Yeah.
So we're going to get this one here
for that has five-point stars and a zebra in it.
That is our combined term search. Oops.
Here we go.
You could do this.
DC:030503
DC: 030503 AND 010103.
Or like we saw before, you could do one and two.
All right, so that's kind of how it works.
Look, folks, you know the basics, okay, CM:
put in your word. Or if you want to pull a design code, you could do DC:
with your five, with your six-digit code in it and pull up stuff that way.
For those of you wondering, "Huh, what do I do if I have both words
and a design, Jason?" Well, guess what?
You could combine them all into a search on one single line using "AND," right.
So let's say our trademark was ZEBRA STAR ORGANIC.
You could do something like this where you're saying
CM:organic, okay?
And you could do search that way.
And it's going to find stuff that has organic
and a zebra and a five-point star in it.
All right.
So real quick knowledge check here.
Before we talk very quickly about narrowing your results.
So Jay, go ahead and launch that poll there.
So before you start answering.
All right.
What I'm asking for is how would you conduct a very narrow knock-out search?
Okay, what would you do to get the most narrow results possible?
Would you look for five-point stars or zebras or ORGANIC? Or would you look
for a combination of the word ORGANIC with a five-point star or a zebra?
Or would you do like we just did and you would say, bring me everything
that has the word ORGANIC and a zebra and a five-point star in it?
Well, it looks like a lot of you are piling on.
Answer the third bullet there for option C.
See, you happen to be correct,
my friends.
That is how you would do a very narrow knock-out search.
You're saying, "Okay, I want to register ZEBRA STAR ORGANIC.
Let me just hope and pray that there's no other ZEBRA STAR ORGANICS out there
and I'll do that search." And you start off that way.
Is that the end of your searching?
No, absolutely not.
You're going to look at zebras, you're going to look at stars,
you're going to look at the word ORGANIC, right?
You're going to look at a whole bunch of other things.
But this is how you would begin with that very narrow knock-out search.
Excellent job, well done. For those of you answering the other two,
hey, I get it. Okay.
I can see how this could potentially be a little bit confusing, right?
Because
when you're thinking about what's the best
search, hey, a narrow knock-out search, not always the best search.
You want to look to find other things.
That second one there, that's a great one, right?
You're going to look for any time
the word ORGANIC appears with one of your design elements.
That's a great way of searching.
You're probably going to use that at some point in your strategy
and because you're going to do multiple search strings.
Okay.
So let's very quickly talk through how to narrow your results,
because I'm sure some of you were saying, "Jason, I'm not going to look through
789 different trademarks.
I don't have time for that. I've got a business to run."
Yeah, okay. I got you.
I got you.
Okay, so one more thing that you want to do is
to limit your results by what's called a coordinated class.
So to understand coordinated class, let's take a real quick step back.
Okay?
So every single good or service that's that you that's that's out
there is classified into one of 45 different international classes.
These are classes that we, the United States, have agreements
with countries around the world.
Everyone has decided chemicals go in this class,
you know,
pharmaceuticals go in this class, beauty products
go in this class, clothing goes in this class, software goes in this class.
sporting goods in this class, and so on. Okay.
Those are called international classes.
So they're kind of divided up that way.
Here's the interesting thing.
We have created something that we call coordinated classes,
so you could think about it as a bit of an
unofficial hack for relatedness, right?
We're not saying that they're related.
However, what we have found is the things that appear in this class
are often related to things that are in this class.
So if you're just starting off your searching,
you know, you could if you wanted to kind of use these coordinated classes
as a way to have a kind of fudge about what relatedness
might be. Again, not a guarantee,
but it's a way to conceptually approach the search that you could think about,
huh, these sorts of things.
Clothing is often related to bags, right?
So we have coordinated things that are in 25 and class 18.
So when you do your search, you can narrow it down that way.
So here's how you would go about doing it.
You could, this is the way you type it, okay?
There's also way you can do it graphically as well.
Show you that in a second.
But this is one way you could go about it.
As you can see, we have our ZEBRA pattern match search
and we've added this thing here that has the coordinated class field code.
So it is going to find things.
So t-shirts are in class 25.
So it's going to find things that are coordinated, coordinated in a class.
It's coordinated to class 25.
Let's take a peek at what that looks like. Okay.
So let's get rid of this real quick.
Let's see.
I can bring up ZEBRA
AND
AND CC:025, all right.
So this is going to find me ZEBRAS
in the trademark bucket and in addition
it's going to only bring me back stuff that is in a coordinated
class with 25, which is where t-shirts happen to be.
We execute that search and what were we
before. It's 2-3 or 700 some? Whatever it was.
No, no, no. 200-some for ZEBRAS. I forget.
This is going to bring it down to 143.
Hey, that's super manageable. Okay.
And so you could go through and you could say, I've got ZEBRA
for my t-shirts and I see, uh oh, HEAD OF ZEBRAS.
This is for luggage. In class 18.
Yeah, class 18 is often related to stuff that's in 25.
Hey, actually, we see that right here.
You can see there's a lot of stuff that's in class 18.
Our bags.
Also guess what?
Class 25 where all of our clothing is.
Right. So that's a potential problem.
We have another HERD OF ZEBRAS over here.
We have ZEBRAOASIS also for stuff here in class 18.
Right.
That could be a problem.
Golf umbrellas. Interesting.
All right.
We have a lot of stuff that's herem happens to be an 18.
We also have stuff over here for "apparatus for timing sports events."
That's because it's in class 14 where jewelry and watches
and things happen to be.
So that's sometimes going to be a problem.
Right?
So you can see you could go through and looking at the coordinated classes.
So that's if you want to type it in up here, here's another thing I'll show you.
This is another thing that we've tried to give you.
If you look on the left-hand side here, if you're an expert mode,
you can see there's this coordinated class toggle.
So I've just turned it off, but I can turn it back on here.
Actually, you know what?
Let me get rid of this up here.
Let me execute ZEBRA one more time.
Okay?
But if we turn up, we have this coordinated
class toggle turned on, and we know our t-shirts are in class 25,
we just select class 25.
It's going to automatically do that little narrowing down for us
by narrowing down to things that are in the coordinated classes with 25,
which are going to be stuff jewelry in 14, our bags and leather goods
in 18, fabrics in 24, our retail
in 35 and 42 and also A, B and 200,
which are collective and certification mark sorts of sorts of things.
So this is a quick and easy
way to do it for you folks out there who know your classes.
You can just turn on expert mode you see down here
and then just use the coordinated class toggle in order to do this.
Okay. So that's one way to go about it.
But let's say coordinated classes is still too many.
"It's too many to look through.
Jason, I can't do it." Well, guess what?
You can narrow a little bit more,
okay,
as we funnel down by using just the international class.
And as you can see here, you could do it by using the IC field tag
instead of the CC field tag.
Now I've added some other stuff here in addition to class
25, you see 35, 42, A, B and 200.
And the reason that I've added those on there is because oftentimes the retail
store services and online retail services are related to goods, right?
Think about Nike.
They've got clothes, clothing, shoes in class 25.
They also have retail store in 35.
Back in the day, it used to be in class 42.
So there's still some old registrations out there
with retail stuff in 42 that's why we include that here.
So you could tag that on as well,
so you could type it in just like this.
Okay, I'm going to turn off the coordinated class.
Okay.
So we would have our ZEBRA up here and we would say,and I see
AND IC:(025 035 042 A B 200).
Then we hit return. Oops.
Oh, I messed it up somehow.
I'm sure that one of the guys will come on and tell me what I did wrong.
History must be between 1 and 24.
Okay.
I'll ask Chris or Brett or Tim to come on and tell me what to do.
We'll catch it in a second. Okay?
But I clearly put something in wrong, so that's one way to go about it,
if you do it right.
That's funny.
Okay, let me get rid of that
and we'll come over here and we'll use this coordinated
class button one more time.
And what we could do is
that we could turn off the coordinated class and instead just look in class 25.
Okay, so instead of typing it in, you can use the little toggle over here
on the left-hand side to just look for stuff that's in class 25.
That's another great way to really narrow down quickly.
We can see there's a lot of
ZEBRA marks in here for various items of clothing,
and let's say that is still too many. Okay.
Some of you might say, J"ason, why don't I just narrow down to goods and services?
I want to register ZEBRA for t-shirts.
So why don't I just look for ZEBRA for t shirts?"
Well, you could, you could do that, but it is not recommended.
And the reason that we don't, it is the fact that
there's more than one way to say t-shirts
and there's more than one thing that's related to t-shirts.
Shirts are related to t-shirts.
Clothing of various varieties are related related to t -hirts.
So if you're only looking for ZEBRA for t-shirts, you might miss potential cites.
And that refusal's
going to come and you'll now be out 250 bucks.
Right.
And your time and your effort.
So it's possible to sort of write it that way,
right?
You could do that if you wanted to.
You could also probably just use the
refining over here if you wanted to.
But this, as I'm telling, is not necessarily recommended.
You're going to miss a lot of stuff if you do it this way.
And we don't want that to happen to you.
We don't want you missing stuff.
We want you to see everything so you can potentially avoid
that likelihood of confusion refusal.
Okay.
So real quick common search strategy. We've already talked through these things.
I just want to solidify it in your mind.
One thing you might want to do is start off an ownership
search for your name, "ON" with your name in there.
And the reason for that is to make sure that business partner
didn't get a wild idea over the weekend and submit something
without you knowing it.
Okay.
Or maybe there's a scammer out there
who's like, tried to submit something in your name.
You to find out about that stuff.
So we often recommend checking your own name in there to see
what's actually in the database.
And then you go through, you conduct that dead-on search, right?
If we think about our pyramid and then alternate spellings, right.
Notting out.
So you're not looking at everything over and over again and you continue
to expand with those additional searches, looking for those alternate versions, words
and designs, similar meanings, acronyms, pictorial equivalents.
Right.
So if the trademark was the word ZEBRA, you might also want
pull that design code
for a zebra and look, because if it's just a picture of a zebra
or a drawing of a zebra versus your word ZEBRA, and you're both using
that as a brand name for t-shirts, hey, that could still be a problem, right?
So you're going to want to find that.
And if you're narrowing, you could start with CC, go down to IC,
using that that formula that we talked about.
And then also you could potentially go down to goods and services.
But it is, that's that's dicey.
Not recommended, not recommended.
Okay.
So real quick, we'll get to like 15 minutes of questions.
Just be aware that they're, with regard to help and things like that.
There are folks out there that are trying to separate you from your cash.
Okay. And we want you to be aware of that.
There are scams that are happening in the trademark industry.
It's no different than any other industry.
In fact, sometimes it might be worse.
And there are folks out there that are trying to come between you and our office.
They're trying to trick you into thinking that they are us and they are not.
And so we've seen it happen where folks have been taken for thousands of dollars.
They've wasted months and months of time.
They've gotten caught up in this thing.
Sometimes these are criminal enterprises and they sort of suck
you into a relationship that you don't want to be in.
So please, please, please be very, very careful.
Educate yourself about all the scams that are out there.
These happen before you file sometimes with these filing firms,
they say, "Oh yeah, we can design a logo for you.
And oh, also, by the way, you'd want to register that as a
trademark, right? There all kind of connected together."
Now are there legit companies? Yes. Okay.
But there are also folks out there that are not legit and they are fraudsters
and they're scammers and we want you to be aware of them.
So there's stuff that can happen before, there's stuff that can happen
after you file where they're sending these solicitations, trying to trick you
into thinking that they are us and they're not. Trying to trick you
into paying an invoice, which we will never, ever send you, okay?
We will never send you an invoice.
We will never try to pressure you into paying for something. We will never ask
for your credit card number over the phone.
We will never ask for your Social Security number over the phone.
None of those things are true.
Please don't fall into that trap.
And there's also scams happen after you register where they will
try and slip in and say, "Oh, you got to file this form." Before it's due.
You think you filed it.
You actually haven't.
And then your registration goes,
it gets canceled because you didn't actually file with us.
You filed with the scammer instead.
So there's all sorts of scams that are happening out there.
Hey, practitioners, this is for you.
If you if you're not already aware, please be aware.
Check your name in our database in the search system.
Okay. Use AT, colon, your name.
Pull up and make sure that you recognize all those files that are in there.
We've seen it where scammers are stealing people's
name and bar information and using that, or
in some cases they're soliciting attorneys to rent their information.
Also, not good.
Please, please, please do not do that. Okay.
So you might want to check and make sure if you're a practitioner as well,
that you're not also being scammed by the scammers.
We have lots of great information on the website.
All sorts of things that you can learn about trademarks if you're new to
the practice area. If you want to download the toolkit, go ahead and scan
the QR code that you see right there on the screen
that will download a toolkit to your phone or your mobile device.
You can keep it for yourself, share it with your friends.
And this sort of takes you through the registration process.
If you're new to intellectual property, you're not sure what you have.
Well, scan that QR code right there.
That'll take you to the IP identifier.
You can take a little quiz and determine if you have a copyright or trademark
a patent.
Maybe it's a trade secret.
You can take a look at that and answer those questions and get more information.
And of course, there's lots of other cool
things that we have, free services available.
If you want to check out the beta of
our chat bot slash virtual assistant slash whatever you want to call it,
check that out.
We're working on improving that thing as well.
If you have questions at any time, you can always contact our Trademark
Assistance Center.
It is our main support center for for trademarks.
They love to talk to you.
They're open 8:30 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Eastern, Monday through Friday.
Give them a call, shoot them an email, they typically pick up within 20 seconds.
So if you want to talk to a human, that's the way to go.
Also keep in mind that we do not provide legal advice
and we cannot help you enforce legal rights, which is why we always recommend
you work with a private attorney, especially when it comes to searching,
because these folks
are going to be your best resource because they're experienced in it.
They understand likelihood of confusion, they understand searching
because they've been doing it for a very long time.
Look, I'll tell you, I've been working for the office for over 20 years.
I clearly still have a little bit of trouble now and then executing a search.
So don't be surprised if you also have trouble
and don't be frustrated with yourself if it takes you a little bit of time
to learn how to do this stuff. If you're busy, you don't have time to do it,
you want to offload that to an experienced practitioner,
hey, highly recommended.
But then again,
if you want to take the time to educate yourself, do it on your own.
That's cool too.
No problem. You can do that.
If you do want to hire an attorney, check out the link
you see at the bottom of your screen.
There's more information about circumstances
in which you must hire an attorney. For our foreign-domiciled friends,
that would be you.
And if you're looking for free and reduced price services,
legal services, check out the link at the bottom of the screen.
There's a whole section right there
on on some pro bono services that are also out there.
And the other thing I would say is please be careful of these filing companies.
I know that I mentioned before, but
some of these companies provide unauthorized practice of law.
You do not want to be involved in those situations.
So if you're going to be working with somebody that you find
just by doing a search on the Internet, please make sure
that they have an attorney on staff that you'll be working with.
The only people who can represent you in your trademark application
are you as the trademark owner or the U.S.-
licensed attorney that you hire. That is it.
Okay? That's it.
You or your attorney.
That's it.
So please be very careful when you are filing your stuff with us.
Okay.
We're going to get to some questions.
Wow. We only have about 8 minutes left.
Sorry about that, folks, but hopefully Chris and Brett and Tim
and Mariessa have been answering things throughout the day today.
So you're not going to be too stranded.
So before we get in those questions, Mariessa, let me just
show folks where the feedback button is real quick here.
So you're probably going that's
why the first thing you're going to say, "Jason, show them the feedback."
So let me go ahead right here.
All right, folks, over here on the right-hand side,
you can see this feedback button right here.
I don't have a little thing to circle it, but oh, oh, maybe I do.
So if you see the feedback button right over there on the right-hand side, boom.
There we go.
Please, please, please use the feedback button.
Okay.
This is how we are going to be able to upgrade the system.
What you see in front of you right now is the minimally viable product
to get this out there.
And we want to hear from you.
We want to hear what changes
you would like to see in the system so we can have it better serve you.
And the feedback button is the way that you let us know what those things are.
Also, if you see a bug, let us know that too.
The one thing I will note, however, is that we do have a lot of feedback
that's coming in, so we will not be responding
to every bit of feedback or suggestion that comes in.
But please understand, if you send it in, we're seeing it, and it's getting sent
along to the developers.
Okay, so you're not going to get a response to your feedback,
but we want you to know we are getting it and we want it.
Okay, cool.
So what do we have,
Mariessa? I'm sure we have a lot of questions that came in.
-We've got a lot of questions.
We have like
of actually a good number of questions, talking about likelihood of confusion,
maybe because this is like a search discussion, basic search.
Let's start with some of those first. Okay.
So the first one, the first question, is there a manual?
Where can we go for help?
I know that you've got us right here on the page so you can navigate to it.
Yes, there is a manual.
This is a question from R, don't have the full name, but we have a letter.
-Okay. All right.
-If you show us real quick where we can go, where's our manual?
-All right, you want the TMEP?
You want the help here?
-I think we want the help here.
-The help here. Okay, R.
Hey, look, you know what?
Some people are so amazing, they can only go by one initial.
That's pretty awesome.
So, R, here you go.
You can see right here on the main page for search.
Oh, I should get my little annotator up right here.
You see this right here?
This is your help right here.
That's where you want to go.
There are, as you can see up here, there are three tabs.
We've got the basic, the advanced, and the glossary.
For everything that you need to know,
just read through the basic right here.
Probably within five minutes between what we've talked about today,
you spending a little bit of time with the system right here.
You can you can see a lot of the basic stuff that you need to do,
which I didn't really show it off,
but if you look right here on the little dropdown,
if you want to look for, "Hey, I want to see all the trademark
applications or registrations that have these particular goods
and services in there."
You could do that if you wanted to by using that little dropdown right there.
If you wanted to look for every trademark that's filed by PepsiCo,
you could do that by searching the owner field, things like that.
So there's ways to kind of, oh, I want to see all trademarks that have
a zebra by looking in the mark description.
You know, you could you could do that too, if you wanted to.
So there's various dropdowns that are available here, right here.
So just keep in mind, you don't have to like type them in.
So as you can see, that's noted here in these bullets.
For those, we got a little bit into the
some of the advanced stuff right here, folks, just because I wanted to
I wanted to give you some more information.
So there's
lots of things that are available here. If you want to find search fields,
like what are those tags that Jason was talking about,
you can open up the "Search fields" dropdown right here.
You can see all the different things that you can search.
Okay, that's getting a little bit too advanced for today.
We're going to talk about this more on October 16th.
But for those of you wondering about coordinated classes
and where you can find information about that, check this out.
The link is right here in the coordinated class thing.
You can just select that link.
It's going to open up all this information here about coordinated classes.
You can even look at these right here like, what did we have? We had
racquetball rackets, which would be sporting goods.
We can scroll down here to 28 and we can see
okay, toys and sporting goods we see right here in 28.
And what are the classes that are coordinated with that?
That's going to be your 9s and 16, 20, 25s, and some of your services.
Okay, So.
So that's one great place to get a whole lot of information
is right here in the help tab.
We talked some about these sort of regular expressions that's putting stuff inside
the little forward slashes.
Here's a great one here for common searches.
So for a lot of you folks, this might be all you need, okay?
This might be all you need right here with some of these more common searches
that are available.
So this is the help right here.
There's a glossary. It's not huge, right?
But it's got some of the some of the information you might find helpful.
But basic and advance, that's where you going to find a lot of great help.
So there you go, R.
-Okay, Jason. Look at you hitting all these different.
You have answered about three or four different questions
with that show and tell.
Thank you so much. Okay. -You got it.
-We are zipping through here.
So hopefully all the folks who are interested in
that heard it loud and clear.
Here's a question from Meredith.
So she just wants you to kind of slowly
walk her through refining by class as opposed to goods and services.
I know that you did that,
but maybe walking it through will help all of us kind of remember that
that's sort of kind of easy to do with our new system.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So let's see. Let's go here.
I don't know, Meredith. We're going to.
Okay, what we're going to do, Meredith, is we're going to search
MEREDITH.
Okay, so there's 84. Okay, of course,
Meredith Gray.
So we're going to look at all the live
MEREDITH marks. "Ooo, 35. Jason, that's too many."
So we wanted to, we wanted to narrow by class, right?
That's what we said.
So did Meredith indicate any particular type of good or service
or should we just guess at it? -No, no, no, she did not.
Oh. Meredith, okay,
Meredith.
Okay,
so the good news is searching for this, like, 35 is nothing to look through.
But as always, it depends,
your trademark always depends
on the specific goods and services that you're using with your trademark.
So let's say, for example,
that you have an Etsy shop, right, where you are
selling your, I don't know, artisanal candles that you make.
I don't know,
Meredith, why I'm thinking you do that, but let's say that that is the case.
Okay?
So I'll tell you right now, those sorts of things are online
retail store services are in class 35.
So all you have to do is type "AND," right.
Because it's always got to be in uppercase.
Sorry if I just split your ears.
But "AND" in all uppercase and then you say coordinated class
35. Okay, so this is going to find us anything
that's the trademark
MEREDITH. And, oh wait, I want to make sure I've got expert mode turned on just in case.
So we've got the word MEREDITH and something
that's in class, coordinated class 35.
We hit the little magnifying glass and we're going,
Oh, man, what did I do?
-What did you do?
Meredith. -Oh, I know what I did.
You forgot to do the CM.
-Yeah.
-See, folks, new system.
-We're all learning it.
-We're all learning. Okay, cool.
So those mistakes are going happen.
So please, if they happen to you too, don't get frustrated.
All right. So we see MEREDITH
in the, in the trademark bucket and we find the 35 coordinated class.
So, Meredith, that's how you do it.
You just you figure out what your class is, right?
And if you want to type it in that way, you can do that.
And as I showed you,
one way you can go about it is by going through the help and looking through
all these classes right here, you can find your coordinated class.
So for here we would be scrolling down.
It would take you might take you a second to find what you're looking for.
I happen to know.
So this is going to be it's actually in the advertising and business services
in class 35.
Okay.
So that's how we get to our class 35.
So that's one way to go about it,
Meredith. And the other would be to if you wanted to,
just use this over here, this filter over here,
that's available in the expert mode.
You select 35.
It's going to do the same thing for you and you're still
going to get those 14 results.
So that's for coordinated class.
If you wanted to narrow down to just the class itself
through the international class, we just turn off the coordinated toggle
right here and you can see it's only class 35.
And you see at this point we're down to seven.
And so that's how you would narrow down
by coordinated class and then international class.
-Okay.
So if you were right here, though, and this is Jenna, let's say we wanted
to modify this search a little bit so we would just see registered marks.
Like
marks that are registered.
Now, Tim was kind enough to answer that question in our Q&A.
He was saying just add, you know, and registered colon
true.
We could add that to the search line and maybe that would help too.
-Here's what I would do.
Okay, here's what I would do.
Okay. And watch. This is going to blow up the system.
But here's a super cool thing you can do, folks, because the asterisk is like
can it can kind of bring you infinite stuff in cases.
So what this is going to do, it's going to find us every registration
because RN means registration number, that asterisk is going to bring us. -Every one.
-Anything you want. Anything. Okay, so this is going to find us
MEREDITH trademarks that are registered.
By using RN:* And we can see right here
we have these
six that are registrations with the word MEREDITH in them.
And for those of you like, "Okay, Jason, what if I want not registered trademarks,
you could let's see what happens if you do "AND NOT" registration number.
That can't be right.
Well I might have broken the system
and Tim is going to come on and be like, "Jason. No.
But what you could do is actually.
-You want us to get Tim.
He's right here.
-Yeah. Tim. What do we want to do.
What's happening here. What? What do we. Do?
What did I do wrong?
-It was correct, actually.
You had seven results and six of them are registered, and one of them was not.
-Oh, so it involves math. Okay. Thank you.
Oh, great.
Pass. Hey, I got it right.
Okay, cool.
So just say, folks, Tim is probably the foremost expert
on our new search system anywhere.
Okay? So he probably knows it better than anybody.
So if you got an answer from Tim, you got the gold standard. -That's right.
-All right, what else we have? Hope that helped you there, Jenna.
-Okay, so, yeah, I think it helped me, too.
Okay, so how about this?
This is just a refresher. When we're doing CM: search,
what are we actually looking at? Is that the word mark and what else?
-Oh, yeah, that's a great question.
Let me show you real quick here, folks.
So if we go back into the help, we can see a little definition
of what that CM stands for.
So we're going to look here in our search fields and scroll down here to combined mark.
This is our CM right here, okay?
You can see right
here, it's going to have the word mark, the pseudo mark, and the translation field.
So that's going to be that bucket, any bucket, any trademark bucket.
And also pseudo mark would be, let's say, remember our COCA-COLA
example from earlier today where someone was trying to register
K-O-Q-A-hyphen, you know, K-O-L-A whatever, right?
That might pop up in the pseudo mark field spelled correctly.
Okay.
And so what this is, this is a great way to go.
The CM is a great way to go, because it's going to it's it's kind of a again,
an unofficial hack, right, for searching alternate spellings of words.
And now it's going to be dependent
on somebody having already submitted that at some point.
But that's one way to kind of go about it
because we're not putting alternate spellings in the pseudo mark field.
It's just if somebody had done that already.
So if you going to search COCA-COLA spelled with Cs and Ks and things
like that,
yeah, it might pop in the pseudo mark field. And a translation field
is going to be if somebody had already submitted translation for that wording.
So let's say the trademark was FIESTA and somebody put in the translation,
you know, FIESTA means, in thea mark, means PARTY.
So PARTY would pop up and if you were doing a search on FIESTA
or PARTY, it should it should pop in terms of the combined mark field.
So that is a really great way to sort of
like give you an easy way in
to finding some alternate spellings and different
foreign translations.
One thing I'll point out, okay, I'll give you this.
I know we're already 5 minutes over,
but let me just show you this real quick here, folks.
You see the CM2.
Here's another kind of like easy way to go about it.
So let's go back here.
If we were going to do CM,
this is right.
We were going to do CM:zebra.
Now, I don't know if this is going to work or not.
We get 691.
If we did see CM2, it's going to find us
plurals and stems of ZEBRA: 729.
So this should be finding us ZEBRAS and stuff that has ZEBRA
stuff coming off the end of the ZEBRA.
The word ZEBRA.
-I think you just blew my mind with that one.
-Mm hmm. Hmm.
Okay, so keep that in mind, folks.
You can just add a little "2" next to this. And it's a quick and
easy way to quickly expand your search to check out some plurals.
Okay. Okay.
-We're getting into the nitty gritty.
So here's a question about those
those pesky little slash marks.
We got these slash marks.
When do, are we supposed to use those? Exactly?
-That is a great question.
I don't know who asked it, but it's a great question.
So here's here's how I think about it. Okay?
If you just want to do a dead-on search,
okay, you just want to search for ZEBRA.
Cool, no little slash is necessary.
But if you want to do some cool kind of like pattern matching
and you wanted to look for, "Is it spelled with an S?
Is it spelled with a Z?" There you would have to put it inside the slashes.
Right.
Those slashes essentially create a little box.
They create a little basket.
They tell the system, "Hey, we're going to do some funky stuff inside here,
okay, so pay attention."
And so the system will then know,
"Okay, things are going to operate a little bit different, right?
We've entered a different universe in our little slashes over here."
So it's only if you're going to essentially be doing a lot of pattern
matching and things like that when you need to use the slashes.
I'll tell you this, right, If we think about, "Hey,
I'm learning the new system or I'm new to the system
or I'm new to trademark searching." One thing you might want to think about
is like pretty much always kind of using the slashes.
I don't know if that's, I don't know.
Tim will come on and tell me,
"Jason, that's a terrible idea
because using the slashes will take away some of your options."
But you're going to be doing
some pattern matching searching probably at some point anyway.
So you can kind of get used to the idea that stuff is going
to go inside of the slashes.
So if you're just doing a dead-on search, don't worry about the slashes.
But anytime you're going to be doing something
that's a little bit more advanced,
then you're going to want to put it inside the forward slashes.
So that's kind of one way to think about it.
-I love this.
The concept of a
you're entering a new dimension and I think that really is helpful.
This is this regular expression dimension.
So here's a question from Seth trying to figure out when to use a dot star
instead of the star.
And I think it kind of flows right into what you're saying, dot star for this
special
dimension, what could you apply that ruler there?
-Yeah. All right.
So let me tell you this, Seth. Okay, so here's the deal.
When you're searching,
we're going to talk about this a little bit more on the 16th.
But when you're when you're here, okay, when you're inside
our alternate universe,
the period or the dot
essentially is an indicator of one character.
Okay, so one character.
So if we wanted to, we we could put it here
and it's going to find us an instance of S-or- Z-E with some sort of character B-R-A.
I wonder what that's going to get us. I don't know. 17. Right.
So we can see here our Z-E-E-B-R-A.
Okay, so a dot equals one character.
Here's the cool thing.
You can use that little quantifier, right?
We could say one or two, right?
So this is going to find us one E or two Es.
Or actually not even that. It's going to find one or two characters.
Okay, I got 18 of these things right?
So if you're like, "I don't care about numbers, Jason."
You should be able to use the
dot star and it's going to find stuff or not, okay?
It's going to find apparently zero or more
unless Tim comes on and says, "No, Jason, you have it exactly wrong."
Right?
So essentially think about the star
as an infinite quantifier.
You could put it here on the end, right?
This might get you, for example, one thing.
So it's only going to find
like these things with an S right here at the end, right?
You can say give me, I only want 1 to 4 things at the very end, right.
You can put whatever digits you want in there.
Right.
Or you could say,
forget that, I want to find everything and you could use the dot star instead.
Right? So think about it as a quantifier.
It's plussing you up.
Okay.
It's a not an exponent, but think about it like an exponent, right?
It's going to it's going to plus up the character or the
whatever you have that comes right before it.
-Okay.
Does that help, Seth?
Hopefully that helps.
-We hope that helps.
We are sort of watching the clock, but you know,
maybe we can answer this question that was submitted,
the rationale for how the results are ordered.
Oh, are these ranked?
We know that in TESS how it went.
But here, is there some sort of
is there a rationale for how these things are listed?
-Yeah, so so Tim could
explain or Chris or Brett could explain it better than I could.
But here's here's how I understand it, folks. Okay?
When you're in regular mode, non-expert
mode, you know, regular-user mode, okay.
Where I think most of us probably belong. There, it's going to, the search system
is going to do its own kind of like, hey, this is what I think might work for you.
Right?
It's not exactly going to be a weighted sort of thing, but, you know,
when you're searching Google or any of the other search engines,
they do a pretty good job of weghting your results to give you the most
the most relevant.
So the search system is trying to do
its best to do that when you're in non-expert mode.
But when you go into
expert mode, it's going to give you more garden variety
results in terms of where things are located.
Tim, I see, you've come on board.
Did I get that right?
-Yes. -Awesome.
Cool.
So it's going to have a. You can explain a little bit more
if you want to, Tim, but. -Go right ahead.
I think you got this. -Okay.
You so, yeah.
So if you want if you want the search system
to do a little of the work for you in terms of possibility
of relevance, then go in non-expert mode.
We should come up with a name for that, not, you know, instead of non-expert mode,
regular-person mode.
Right.
And then if you go in expert, then it's going to be more straightforward results.
So that's kind of quick answer. -Okay.
You want to do one more before.
-Sure. -Okay.
How do you pull up your,
This is from Carol, wanting to pull up previous search strategies.
We saw you moving rapidly as you were looking through your searches.
And yeah, can you show us like sort of slow motion.
-Sure sure sure sure sure. Here we go.
Okay,
you hit the x.
-Voila.
Okay. -Boom. There you go.
And now you've got your search history right here, Carol.
So as you can see,
we go all the way back to number one.
I forget exactly
what the upper limit is on this.
I mean, it doesn't go infinite, right?
Because I think it can run into some problems.
But unlike previous versions, like TESS had a little bit of a limit to it.
Might have been 200. Our internal system certainly had a limit to it.
There's less of a limit here. So you can go back and if you're like,
"Okay, well, Jason, I don't want to have like 400 search things here.
It's going to take forever to go through." You know, how you can do that.
Well, guess what?
You can just close it, okay.
And then when you close out your browser,
it is going to essentially clear the history.
Let me open it back up again over here and you'll see that all of the
here, I'll show you different way to get in this.
By the way, if you go to the Trademarks page, you can just hit "Search trademarks."
It's going to bring you the same thing.
All of that search history should be gone.
Yes. Yes, it is.
And if we search MEREDITH again, that'll probably be search number one.
Right?
So one more time you see your history
by hitting the x here, I'll annotate
by hitting the x right here.
And there we go.
We see our one search history. Now it's been reset.
And so MEREDITH is number one.
Number one on the sheet.
-Okay.
And when you had all those different search strings up there, you're also able
to manipulate them so you can search different lines together, right?
-Yeah, that's right.
You can do 1 AND 2 or 3 AND NOT 1 and, you know, things like that.
So you can you can, you can do you can even do multiples:
1 AND 2 AND 3. Right.
You could do multiple search strategy,
combining them together that way if you wanted to.
-Mm hmm.
Okay. Last question.
So does
the public have the same search system that the examining attorneys are using?
-Essentially, yes.
Now, it looks a little bit, a little bit different
for examining attorneys on the on the inside.
But it's the same stuff.
It's not like they have more results than you do or anything like that.
You all have access to the exact same database.
You're still using the same way to kind of search for it and things like that.
So look, for those of you learning this brand new system, right,
who've been used to using TESS, they are examining core 750 plus
folks have been using
the internal version of TESS for 20 some years.
They're having to learn this new search system, too.
So there's whole lot of learning that is happening at the USPTO right now.
But there's it's
just a different interface that they have because it's part of an internal system.
You have a separate sort of external version of it,
which in some ways can be good for you, right?
Because the searches that you're trying to
do might be different than the searches that examining attorneys are trying to do.
Like the stuff you might do on a regular basis might be a little bit different.
So there might be ways by using the,
oh, I don't know, feedback button over here that you can let us know
of something different that you need or think you want here for the system.
Again, we can't guarantee we're going to be able
to do everything that you need because, look, a lot of different types of
folks are using this search engine for a lot of different types of things.
But if there's something specific that works well for folks
that are external,
hey, we're willing to to look at them and see what we can get into place.
I'll tell you right now,
we've, based upon the feedback we've had over the past couple of weeks,
we already have a couple of things that are moving their way towards
production.
We're going to try and get those implemented as quickly as possible.
Some of the things that came in,
some of the requests are going to take a while to do.
It's going to have to,
you know, it'll just take time to make those sorts of changes.
But if there's quick and easy stuff that we can do, absolutely happy to do it.
We want this system to be something that works well for you.
And so that's why it's so important
that we hear from you and hear what it is that you need.
Yeah, I mean, one thing, if you if you might have noticed the expert mode button.
Yeah, it's like on the front page now that was a recommendations
suggestion from one of our attendees. So
yeah, thanks.
-You are
right here.
You could turn it on before you even begin, so.
-Okay. -Well.
Well I guess we are way over time, and so we should get out of here.
But one thing I will say, folks, let me just
open up very quickly.
We have a lot of great stuff that's happening at the USPTO.
So, look, thank you, by the way, for those of you
who've stuck around for an extra 17 minutes. Awesome.
Thank you so much.
I understand you guys got to get back to the rest of your lives. Things like that.
But just keep in mind, we have a lot of really super cool things
coming up. I say super cool in the nerdiest way possible.
So if you're interested in future
strategies on anti-Counterfeiting, and anti-piracy, check that out.
That's going to be tomorrow in Alexandria.
If you're a patent person, we have all sorts of stuff about patents
that's going on.
Our patent pro-bono program.
The Path to a Patent program begins on the 12th. For you
trademark folk who are like, "Hey, this was okay, Jason.
Mariessa's is awesome.
I would like to see more of her explaining things."
Well, guess what?
Tomorrow, October 3rd, we begin module one of our Trademark Basics Boot Camp.
It's eight weeks. It's free.
We take you through the application
and registration process from beginning to end.
We even do walkthrough of a form.
We're going to do another sort of walkthrough just like today
in a couple of weeks.
That'll be, I think on the 17th. Mariessa's going to be leading that one.
So if you're interested in hanging out with us and learning more trademark
stuff, more basics, please, please, please, sign up for the Trademark Basics
Boot Camp. Love to have you there.
If you're going to be in Montrose, Colorado, or in the surrounding
area on Thursday, hey, come see me in person.
We're going to do an all day trademarks boot camp in Montrose, Colorado.
We're going to take you through,
we're going to essentially condense the eight weeks of virtual boot camp into
one day, and we're going to do it in-person in Montrose.
So come for that.
I'm just going to kind of
scroll here, just there's just so many great things going on here.
Her you go, strategies for protecting intellectual property in China, right?
That's going to be in San Diego.
We have this Women's Entrepreneurs.
It's part of our Women's Entrepreneurship program or symposium.
It's the WE program.
This is all about protecting and promoting your brand. That's virtual
And in Illinois, if you happen to be near Evanston.
So all kinds of really great stuff.
And of course here on the 16th is when be coming back to talk through some of
those advanced techniques. We dipped our toes into them a little bit today.
We're going to dip a whole lot farther.
We'll just do a belly flop into some advanced techniques
coming up, and it's going to be in two-weeks time.
And so a big thank you to all of you who've stuck around.
Big thank you to Jay, as always,
for helped running today's program from the Webex technical side of things.
And also big huge thank you to Mariessa and to Brett
and to Chris and to Tim for helping out with the questions today.
And a big thank you for, to all of you for coming and learning.
We really do appreciate it and we will see you soon.
Take care.