Finding relationships in Trademark Data by Matt Overstreet.
From the post:
At the recent National Day of Civic hacking here at OSC we dug into a few ways to find relationships between Trademarks files with the USPTO.
If you’ve ever played with the US trademark data you’ll know that it’s both plentiful and scarce. There are lot’s of trademark fillings, each with the minimum possible data to make them uniquely identifiable.
That’s great for streamlined government and citizen anonymity, but no fun for finding the relationships between filings. We needed to suss out more information about the graph of trademarks. That’s when we Eric and Wes tripped over the translations included in many of the patent filings. We wondered if the term space for these translations might be smaller and more consistent then the space defined by the actual trademarks. Translations were less likely to play games with spelling or grammar the way one might with the actual mark.
Some Hacking with the data and Neo4j resulted in an intriguing dataset that we are still unpacking. Want to play with the data? Neo4J loaded with data is at this url: http://rosetta.bloom.sh:7474/webadmin/
Curious to know what you make of the theory:
Translations were less likely to play games with spelling or grammar the way one might with the actual mark.
I’m not sure that is a useful assumption:
Marks consisting of or including foreign words or terms from common, modern languages are translated into English to determine genericness, descriptiveness, likelihood of confusion, and other similar issues. See Palm Bay ,396 F.3d at 1377, 73 USPQ2d at 1696. With respect to likelihood of confusion, “[i]t is well established that foreign words or terms are not entitled to be registered if the English language equivalent has been previously used on or registered for products which might reasonably be assumed to come from the same source.” Mary Kay Cosmetics, Inc. v. Dorian Fragrances, Ltd. , 180 USPQ 406, 407 (TTAB 1973).[Examination Guide 1-08]
Use of the English translation to judge “…genericness, descriptiveness, likelihood of confusion, and other similar issues.”, lends an incentive for “…play[ing] games with spelling or grammar….”
If you are interested in the data set, you may find the resources at: Trademarks Home useful.
Caution: Legal terminology may not have the semantics you expect.