Question: When is a design patent not a design patent?
Answer: When it is a trademark’s registration certificate of course!
Just when I thought I’d seen it all I came across this on uspto.gov:
Design patent D17061’s drawing page is for a dish design but the specification page is actually the registration certificate for trademark 17061. A simple enough mistake right? But here’s the twist, the registration certificate online is almost illegible and is stamped ‘Best Available Copy’ but they’re wrong! The best copy is in D17061 which looks just about perfect!
- Not so legible registration certificate for trademark 17061 on uspto.gov
- Design patent D17061 on uspto.gov
- google patents has it wrong too!
- Newly Ocr’d text of the “registration certificate”!
Now to solve the mystery of where the design patent’s specification page is. It’s offline on USP011 of the set of 1100 USAPat dvd’s the uspto once produced! It’s a tiff image file on that dvd or right here on HistoricIP as D0017061.pdf.