The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is continually improving its electronic systems to better serve our customers. To this end, the USPTO recently enhanced the Electronic Trademark Assignment System (ETAS) and the assignment information publicly available, as follows:
1. Assignment customers will now receive their notice(s) (of receipt, recordation, and non-recordation) back via e-mail, where e-mail communication has been authorized. If the notice(s) is undeliverable to the e-mail address provided, the notice(s) will be sent via regular U.S. Postal Service mail.
2. Trademark documents recorded with the Assignment Services Branch are now viewable by the public on the USPTO website. To view the cover sheet and any underlying documents supporting the assignment, the customer should click on the Reel/Frame for the assignment of interest when viewing the Trademark Assignment Abstract of Title. A "View Recorded Assignment" icon will appear to the right of the Reel/Frame information. Alternatively, if the Reel/Frame is known, one can enter it directly into the Trademark Assignment Query Menu and the "View Recorded Assignment" icon for that Reel/Frame will appear.
3. Entity type and citizenship information for the receiving party are now mandatory fields on the Assignment Recordation Cover Sheet. Therefore, an electronically-filed assignment cannot be submitted without this information. This enhancement will avoid the previous denials of recordation when this information (required by 37 CFR §3.31(a)(8)) was inadvertently omitted and will shorten the timeframe for receiving Notices of Recordation when this information is provided.
4. All ownership information received from the International Bureau (IB) of the World Intellectual Property Office for Requests for Extension of Protection (Madrid 66(a) trademark applications) can now be entered into the assignment databases to be viewable on the USPTO website.
In the near future, the Trademark Assignment Abstract of Title information for Madrid applications, available on the USPTO website related to assignments, will correspond to the current ownership information in the Trademark Application and Registration Retrieval (TARR) database and to the ownership documents appearing in the Trademark Document Retrieval.