You’ll receive a trademark specimen refusal if the specimens you submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) are inappropriate or insufficient to demonstrate use of your trademark in connection with the products and/or services listed in your trademark application. If the specimens don’t meet the USPTO’s strict requirements, the examining attorney will issue a trademark office action explaining why the specimens cannot be accepted.
A USPTO Suspension Inquiry is a written communication from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) inquiring about the status of the event that caused the suspension of your trademark application. For example:
Simply put, a Letter of Suspension (a/k/a Suspension Notice) means that a trademark application has been put on hold for a particular reason. It’s not unusual to receive a Letter of Suspension from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) after filing a trademark application or a response to a trademark office action. Of course, many people who file their own trademark applications, or choose to use a do-it-yourself trademark service such as Trademark Engine, LegalZoom, or Trademarkia, are surprised to receive a Letter of Suspension and understandably have no idea what it means or whether it requires any kind of response. This article explains why trademark applications are sometimes suspended and what you should do if your application is suspended.
Understanding who should be listed as the applicant of a trademark application in the USPTO is absolutely critical. Naming the wrong applicant is one of the most common errors made by people who choose to file their own trademark applications. The worst part is that you generally don’t even know you made the error until you try to enforce your trademark registration against an alleged infringer and, in response, the infringer files a trademark cancellation against your registration on the basis that it’s void. That’s one nasty surprise you don’t want. The good news is that this mistake is easily avoidable if you spend some time carefully considering which individual or entity should be named as the applicant.
Potential clients frequently ask me whether they should trademark a name and logo together in one application. Well, here’s the answer. If the name of your product/service is distinctive (i.e. a name that’s eligible for registration on the Principal Register and not only on the Supplemental Register), there’s almost no benefit to applying to register your name and logo together. In fact, the only benefit is that you’ll save money by filing one trademark application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rather than two. But, is saving a few hundred dollars really a good enough reason to seek registration of your name and logo together rather than separately?
