Trademark Abandonment can attach to Applications in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) who face Office Actions and miss the six (6) month deadline to file a formal response. Under the USPTO rules, if the USPTO does not receive a response within this period, the application is declared abandoned and a Notice of Trademark Abandonment will be mailed to the applicant or applicant’s attorney.
When trademark abandonment attaches to a federal trademark application, the application is labeled as “dead” in the USPTO Trademark Database and will no longer be labeled as pending. An application is considered to be abandoned as of the day after the date on which a response was due, even though the examining attorney performs the Trademark database transaction that reports the abandonment at a later date.
The best way to avoid abandonment of a trademark application which has received an Office Action is to ensure a response is filed before the six month anniversary of the Office Action issue date.
Options After Trademark Abandonment Has Attached to Applications in USPTO
If a trademark application misses the six (6) month office action response deadline, even by one day, the application will enter a process whereby a Notice of Trademark Abandonment will be formally issued, and that notice will have an issue date. Under the rules, if the trademark application was abandoned unintentionally or trademark abandonment was due to Office error, the applicant has a deadline of (2) two months from the issue date of the notice of abandonment to file either (1) a petition to revive the application or (2) a request to reinstate the application.
In other words, trademark applications which have been formally abandonment do have options for revival. They should be consulted by a trademark attorney to revive the application and preserve the application filing date, which in some cases, may be the earliest priority date.
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Author: David N. Sharifi, Esq. is a Los Angeles based intellectual property attorney and technology startup consultant with focuses in entertainment law, emerging technologies, trademark protection, and “the internet of things”. David was recognized as one of the Top 30 Most Influential Attorneys in Digital Media and E-Commerce Law by the Los Angeles Business Journal in 2014. Office: Ph: 310-751-0181; david@latml.com.
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