It’s Not a Wonderful Trademark Examination

It’s a wonderful life, collaborating with brand owners and marketing teams to advance their goals.

Our work for brand owners often involves a collaboration of sorts with the U.S. Trademark Office.

We work with the USPTO to obtain registrations for our clients and this triggers USPTO obligations.

As such, when examining applications, the USPTO must search its records for conflicting marks.

It must refuse registration of applications for marks confusingly similar to prior registered marks.

Mistakes happen, but sadly, if the USPTO misses a proper refusal, the brand owner holds the bag.

So, when the USPTO doesn’t do its job well, the brand owner is put in a position to spend money.

Several weeks ago, I expressed near certainty that the USPTO would refuse registration of Kevin O’Leary’s (of Shark Tank fame) application to federally register his nickname — Mr. Wonderful — given another’s well-established, federally-registered trademark rights in WONDERFUL for nuts:

Surisingly, the USPTO has issued no refusal, and the Mr. Wonderful mark for nuts has been approved for publication. If you’re at a loss how can that be, here is the USPTO’s search summary.

As it reveals, the “session duration” lasted 218 seconds; not a single “wonderful” mark was “viewed” during examination, yet hundreds of “mr” trademark records were, maybe even him?

Strangely, the “mr” portion of the search was narrowed to focus on the nuts class of goods (IC 29), but this wasn’t done for the “wonderful” portion, leading to zero “wonderful” viewed records.

Let’s just call this oversight for what it is, not exactly a wonderful trademark examination by the USPTO — literally and figuratively. The Mr. Wonderful approval — for nuts –looks like clear error.

Were we in Wonderful’s camp, we’d be thinking about a Letter of Protest to have the USPTO issue the likelihood of confusion refusal, because it costs peanuts compared to a full-blown opposition.

Trademark types, would you get crackin’ on a Letter of Protest, were you holding Wonderful’s bag?

Marketing types, how nuts would you be spending a lot more than peanuts, if the USPTO doesn’t acknowledge clear error and issue the refusal, to help make a Notice of Opposition unnecessary.

To the extent you’re in Mr. Wonderful’s camp, how would you approach a registration refusal, knowing that 15 of the 16 live “wonderful” marks at the USPTO for nuts are Wonderful’s marks?

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