A fraud by any other name would… well…

While our intrepid brother the TTABlogger resorts to reading entrails, employing dowsing rods and attending seances in his search for the answer to “fraud on the PTO” trademark truth, the crew over at New York’s Kalow & Springut has been laboring every bit as mightily to get their arms around the thing.  Frequent LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® commenter, neighbor, fellow-congregant and -commuter and all around good American Tal Benschar sends along what they’ve got (note the links):

Ron:
Just wanted to share with you a couple of articles my partners and I recently published in the New York Law Journal about fraud, and related matters.  (The first was pre-Bose, the second after.)
It seems like this issue is going to continue to be a hot one in TTAB practice.
Feel free to post or ciruclate the articles as you wish.

I wish a free blog post like that would come along every day, is what I wish!

I made some effort, though:  Listen up.

These articles by Tal, along with David Kalow and Milton Springut, are not only useful because they round up pretty much all the relevant law, but because they put lawyers who prosecute trademark applications on notice of the wide range of possible grounds on which the new and improved criteria for fraud on the PTO may still be asserted.

The authors also remind us that, dramatic TTAB claims for cancellation notwithstanding, at the prosecution level, attorneys who make representations to the PTO when they prepare trademark applications are not merely “filling out a form”–an easy enough feeling to get these days when, unlike in days not so long past, a trademark registration application looked and felt a lot more like a legal paper than it does via today’s online version.  Trademark lawyers, and those they direct, are essentially pledging their professional credibility with everything they tell the PTO is true in order to get that ®.

That’s still worth something, isn’t it?

Originally posted 2010-02-22 14:48:09. Republished by Blog Post Promoter