The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) provides administrative procedures for contesting the validity of a trademark registration through a procedure known as cancellation proceeding via a “Petition to Cancel” an already registered mark. This procedure is useful to eliminate an interfering trademark registration or to weaken an opponent’s threatening litigation. It is also useful to cancel a mark that perhaps should not have been obtained and is now being cited against your pending application. The cancellation proceeding is essentially a micro-lawsuit within the USPTO and ...
Continue Reading → ShareIn light of the Enfish, LLC v. Microsoft Corp. ruling by the Federal Circuit, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has updated its guidance to the Examiners. In it, Examiners are to consider that a claim “directed to an improvement to computer-related technology (e.g., computer functionality) is likely not similar to claims that have been previously identified as abstract by the courts.” The guidance also cautioned Examiners “against describing a claim at a high level of abstraction untethered from the ...
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