After grading many, many assignments by college students this week

[Ms. Toad]

77. Mostly I did licensing and patent work.

My favorite trademark story was the pinyin + character mark a client from China wanted. If you've played with Chinese words much, pinyin words often have multiple characters associated with the same "word," especially if the diacritical marks have been removed from the word.

One of the character words associated with the pinyin word (absent diacritical marks) was, literally, the name of the product - but the actual character (included in the mark - so it identified which character word the pinyin word was associated with) meant something entirely different.

Of course, the trademark office rejected it, based on one meaning of the pinyin word. My boss (the office trademark guru) told me they would never allow it (thinking it was like an English word - in which any of the definitions of the (pinyin) word would have disqualified it as a mark). That would have been correct - except that it was the chinese character word they should have been checking the definition of - not the pinyin representation of it that could be traced backwards to multiple different words, only one of which was being claimed (not to multiple different definitions)

Long story short - I was able to appeal the rejection by painstakingly drawing out where they had gotten lost (politely, of course), and it was approved in less than an hour after I submitted the appeal - approximately the length of time it would have taken them to read the appeal.

The white font was really odd - that's why it took me so long to find the problem. Now that I'm trying to reconstruct it - it wasn't the spacing that was off, it was that the "deleted" word (in the Word document) kept magically appearing in the .pdf when the paralegal converted it. I sent it back to be corrected. She insisted she had corrected it (but didn't even bother to check the .pdf to see that it was still there. I found it, again, and sent it back. Wash, rince, repeat. I was about to retype it from scratch when I had the thought to go back to the Word document and search for the magical-text-that-couldn't-be-deleted. The search highlighting landed on what appeared to be an empty space in the Word document. So I changed the font color - and voila! there it was!