A Real Life Example
This illustrates two of the problems just mentioned. A friend of mine was trying to identify what he thought was a trademark on an antique wrench. If you’ve read a few of my web pages, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine that I have some interesting friends and that a request like this wouldn’t be unusual. My friend had suspected who made the wrench and had even found a registration certificate for that company. The problem was that the accompanying drawing mentioned in the registration certificate on uspto.gov is not included in the pdf.
To find the image I consulted the patent gazette (many online Patents->Patent Gazettes above) for the registration date shown in the registration certificate. I then consulted the patent gazette for the published date shown in the gazette for that trademark.
Patent Gazette image when the trademark was published for opposition. If the trademark applicaiton is not successfully opposed by someone with a similar trademark, it will go on to be registered and receive a registration number. Note the serial number shown matches the serial number in the registration certificate.
And now for some real fun, lets look up this trademark by registration number at tsdr.uspto.gov.
Notice that the tsdr serial number shown does not match the one shown in the patent gazette the trademark was published in, nor the regisrtration gazette, nor does it match the serial number shown in the registration certificate. This means that you cannot look up this trademark at tsdr.uspto.gov by the serial number shown in the March 15, 1910 gazette. Apply any super serial number you want, you still won’t find the registration certificate for this trademark if all you have is the serial number shown when the trademark was published for opposition. This is one of over 600,000 trademarks where the tsdr serial number = 60 million + the registration number.