The USPTOUnited States Patent and Trademark Office. See also PTO. released the final version of its 2018-2022 Strategic Plan today. I previously wrote about the flaws in the draft strategic plan. The draft plan did, however, at least note the importance of stakeholder engagement. To assist in this goal, the Office asked for comments on the draft.
In fact, the released strategic plan states that:
The problem is that a detailed comparison of the draft and final plans reveals that a total of two substantive changes were made to the text provided for comment. In one, the final plan notes that ensuring trademark validity is important and announces plans to regularly audit and “de-clutter” the trademark registry. The other change recognizes that user interface is important when rolling out new tools to examiners.
That’s the entirety of the substantive “appropriate changes” resulting from input by 44 sets of stakeholder comments on the draft plan.
