Earlier this year, Commissioner for Trademarks Mary Boney Denison reported to the House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet Committee on the Judiciary that “the USPTO is aggressively taking steps to combat the various threats to our trademark system.” In a recent blog post, we announced new ways to enhance trademark security, and we added new filing features for trademark users.
On October 26, 2019, mirroring our requirements for patent users, we deployed security measures that now require trademark users to log in using a USPTO.gov account with two-step authentication in order to access the Trademark Electronic Application System (TEAS) and TEASi (international) systems. Now, both trademark users and patent users will have the same secure access to USPTO online resources for paying fees and conducting business.
Another significant security change that will take place over this weekend will limit Patent Private PAIR research to return only that data associated with that customer number. In other words, we will remove the ability for Private PAIR users to mine data belonging to others in Private PAIR—that is, to run automated scripts (bots) that query data not associated with that individual user account and its associated customer number(s).
Beginning this weekend, publicly available data of others will be available only through Public PAIR. Therefore, in order to access such data, patent users are encouraged to use Public PAIR and Patent Examination Data System, which offer the capability to search, display, and download Public PAIR content in machine-readable formats (XML and JSON). This security change is one of several steps we are taking in our increased effort to secure and improve USPTO online performance for all members of the IP community.
Please search for more information about Public PAIR and the Patent Examination Data System on our USPTO website. Alternatively, please contact the Patent Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 between 6 a.m. and midnight ET, Monday through Friday, or email ebc@uspto.gov.