Conservancy Asks Trademark Office to Protect Applicant's Personal Privacy

[Software Freedom Conservancy]

CONSERVANCY ASKS TRADEMARK OFFICE TO PROTECT APPLICANT'S PERSONAL PRIVACY

Software Freedom Conservancy today submitted a petition to the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office (USPTO) asking that Office to reconsider recent
rulemaking that exposes trademark owners' personal addresses.  This
rulemaking has a direct impact on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
projects and charities (like Conservancy) that work to advance software
freedom.  FOSS is developed virtually, with limited budgets, and rarely does
a FOSS project have office space.  FOSS projects that register trademarks
should not be required to disclose the personal, residential, home address
of the project leaders.  Furthermore, software freedom organizations are
more likely to be full-telecommute organizations, in which case, the new
USPTO rule requires disclosure of officers and/or directors home addresses.

Our petition to the USPTO responds to a recent change the USPTO made to its
rules, which now require that individuals provide their residential address
in all trademark applications and keep that information current throughout
the life of the registration. In the past, the USPTO only required a mailing
address, and in particular post office boxes and other paper mail receipt
services were acceptable. The address information is available in a public
database freely searchable on the Internet. Therefore, this rulemaking opens
all trademark owners to a variety of negative consequences in our digital
age, and would be acutely felt by those who are most vulnerable. In addition
to FOSS project leaders without office-space budget, and who have no wish to
share their personal information unnecessarily, our member project Outreachy
gives software freedom opportunities to to people who are subjected to
systemic bias or who have been impacted by underrepresentation. We always
hope our Outreachy interns will later start new FOSS projects and otherwise
participate as FOSS project and charity leaders or FOSS business
owners. Accordingly, we must formally object to this new requirement, both
for ourselves and the FOSS constituencies we support and foster.

In the petition, Conservancy explains to the USPTO why mandatory disclosure
of residential addresses can be so harmful to applicants and paints a
complete picture of how essential it is for governmental agencies to take
better care in collecting and exposing this information. Anyone hoping to
start a new free software project, nonprofit community or new business
should strongly consider registering the trademark for their brand. But many
of these people will be working out of their homes, and the new rule would
unnecessarily require providing this basic, highly sensitive personal
information to the entire world — just to get started. Even worse, the
poorer the person, the fewer options available for avoiding it.

Conservancy's petition also exposes that the USPTO added this requirement
without following proper rulemaking procedure. Had they followed the correct
process, the public would have had the opportunity to inform the USPTO on
the substantial risk to personal safety the new practice creates, allowing
the USPTO to consider other approaches that might better protect privacy
interests.

Conservancy asks in its petition that the USPTO temporarily suspend the rule
and instead start a new round of rulemaking that will allow the public's
input on the requirement.  Watch our blog, news items, and social media for
updates to follow this story, as our petition is the first step in a
multi-stage effort to correct this error by the USPTO.

ANNOUNCEMENT URL:
  https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/sep/19/uspto-personal-addresses/

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS:
  https://twitter.com/conservancy/status/1174766657635373056
  https://mastodon.technology/@conservancy/102820832693435108