Save the World and Save Some Cash

According to a Federal Register notice of February 8, 2012, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is launching a twelve-month pilot program to incentivize the distribution of patented technologies to address humanitarian needs.  Program judges independent of the USPTO will select award winners from the first 1000 program applications accepted by the USPTO.  Applicants will be assigned to one of four categories: Medical Technology, Food & Nutrition, Clean Technology, and Information Technology.

Awardees will receive a certificate redeemable to accelerate select matters before the USPTO and public recognition for their efforts, including an award ceremony at the USPTO. In the case of prioritized examination of a new patent application, the value of the award will be $4800.00 for a large entity.  In view of the fact that the award is a credit toward future services and is not transferable to others, the program offers the greatest financial incentive to large entities who are active patent filers. 

Applications will be accepted from March 1, 2012, through August 31, 2012. 

More information is available at a website dedicated to this program.

Dot-Anything Domains: good.idea or bad.idea?

Is too much freedom a bad thing?  Established trademark owners may think so, as a result of the relaxation of restrictions for generic top-level domains (gTLDs).  On January 12, 2012, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) began accepting applications for new gTLDs that are essentially limited only by the imagination of the applicant.  Applicants able to afford the initial $185,000 “evaluation fee” and ongoing maintenance fees will be entitled to coin their own gTLDs to compete with conventional gTLDs such as .com, .net, .org, etc. 

Unfortunately, this expansion of the universe of potential gTLDs places a greater burden on trademark owners to police their marks. ICANN does not accept reservations or pre-registrations based on trademarks, but registries will be required to operate sunrise or intellectual property claims services for the protection of trademarks in the new gTLDs.

While it is possible that wealthy trademark owners will purchase gTLDs identical to their marks (e.g., ".toyota"), it is impractical for trademark owners to purchase rights to their trademarks as second level domains for each of the potentially unlimited number of new gTLDs (e.g., toyota.car, toyota.auto, toyota.suv, etc.).

Hopefully, the high cost of entry will ward off the average cybersquatter and trademark pirate from establishing infringing gTLDs.  Continuous monitoring of developments is recommended nonetheless.