Beware of Official-y Correspondence

Once you get that trademark filed be aware that your information is of public record, which means, unfortunately, some will mine that resource & some of those folks will send you solicitations. 

These solicitations often look very official, and "may use names that resemble the USPTO name, including, for example, one or more of the terms "United States," “U.S.,” "Trademark," "Patent," "Registration," "Office," or "Agency."  

Some will even have documents that resemble actual government documents rather than what you'd expect a company to send and this is often done by "emphasizing official government data like the USPTO application serial number, the registration number, the International Class(es), filing dates, and other information that is publicly available from USPTO records."

Most of these are asking you for money. That's your major warning flag.

"All official correspondence will be from the “United States Patent and Trademark Office” in Alexandria, VA, and if by e-mail, specifically from the domain “@uspto.gov.”

If you did receive something that you're not too sure about go ahead and forward it to me - shannon at tmexpress dot com - and I can confirm if it's official or not.

Read more about what the USPTO has to say about this here.

More Changes Coming to the USPTO's Online Presence

The USPTO issued a press release on December 7th. Here are the details:

On or about December 16, 2011, the USPTO will introduce a new system, Trademark Status and Document Retrieval (TSDR 1.0). TSDR 1.0 will redefine the way Trademark status data and all documents will be displayed to the public. It reengineers the existing functionality that TARR and TDR currently provide and adds new features, providing access to one place for viewing, printing, and downloading snapshots of the data the USPTO stores about a trademark application or registration.

New features include:

• The ability to preview and print the status content being presented.
• The ability to download a PDF or the original form of the status content (an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file).
• The ability to view the mark as stored in the USPTO mark image repository, and expand the size thereof through mouse rollover feature.
• The organization of content into logical sections, with a more logical arrangement of the content within those sections.
• The ability to collapse and expand sections of the data.
• The ability to move easily between status and document content.
• The presentation of basis data at both the case and class levels.
• Links to related properties, where applicable.
• Access to Trademark status data without going to the TSDR site via an Application Programming Interface (API), which is accessible via unique URL’s that allow the retrieval of data in a specified format (PDF or XML).
• Significant decrease in the amount of time between an update to the internal USPTO database record and what is available externally (seconds as opposed to hours).

Please note that, at a currently undetermined point, both TARR and TDR will disappear. Until then, the links for both TARR and TDR will take the user to an "interim" page, from which either the existing system can be reached or the new TSDR 1.0 can be accessed.