Email sent to the trademark scammer
No idea if they’ll even respond to this. They probably won’t. But it’s more paper trail for me and the credit card company, at least.
Hi, I am still waiting for contact information for your attorney. I cannot find any public records that indicates that he works with your firm and I would greatly appreciate any evidence to the contrary. The public records indicate that he works with Skyworks Solutions, a semiconductor manufacturer in Irvine, California.
Additionally, in the USPTO filing it appears that a registration was only performed for class 41, when I was told that it would also be registered on additional classes (namely 9 and 35), which would justify the amount I was charged. Could I please get an itemized bill of what the $999 went to?
I also still am concerned about the need for this registration having been done in the first place. Looking at the USPTO database, the only recent/pending registrations I’ve found for “Sockpuppet” or “sock puppet” are for the baseball team as previously mentioned (and they are indeed in class 41), and also there is still the issue of common law trademark regarding band names; for example:
- Gerben Law: An Overview of Common Law Trademark Rights
- LegalZoom: How to Establish a Common Law Trademark
- Stan Soocher: Big Legal Battles Over Rights in Bands' Names
Secure Your Trademark: Trademarking a band name
The legal advice is in; the mega pop star can’t force you to drop your band name because, technically, you arrived on the music scene several years before she did. But from now on, when you mention the name of your band, people are probably going to start humming “All About That Bass.” Here, the degree of trademark protection you missed out on becomes evident.
[…]
Key Takeaway: When two or more non-trademarked bands share the same or a similar name, the one with the highest seniority usually wins and ends up with trademark protection.
USPTO: I Received a Letter/Email…, particularly this excerpt:
Federal registration is not required to establish trademark rights. Even if a trademark registration expires or is cancelled, the trademark owner may continue to have “common law” rights in the mark. Common law rights arise from actual use of a mark for particular goods or services and may allow the common law user to successfully challenge another party’s use in court.
Furthermore, my records show that I requested a cancellation of this process early on Friday, and I was told that I would receive a call “as soon as possible.” I never received that call, and then on Monday I was told that it was too late for a refund as the paperwork had already been submitted.
In addition, both California and Washington are two-party consent states, and I’d like to note that I was only informed that the initial call was being recorded quite a ways into it (when I asked for more information about the competing mark), and was never asked for my consent to be recorded. However, the existence of the recording was later used to threaten me when I mentioned the possibility of issuing a chargeback.
Given that the paperwork does seem to have been filed as promised, I am willing to only take a partial refund based on the services actually rendered, but I am still not exactly thrilled with how this entire process has been handled, nor with the timbre of your communications to me.
I am sure that any disputes along these lines can be cleared up with a simple conversation with your attorney, so I would greatly appreciate being able to have such a converation.
Thank you.