Green Patent Blog

Green Energy Resources (GER) provides wood fiber fuels, including wood chips, sawdust and biomass for various applications, including power production and for raw materials for cellulosic ethanol production.  GER’s wood products comply with the Kyoto Protocol and meet all European Union regulatory requirements, so they can be used in the EU as well as the U.S.

GER made news recently when it began offering carbon offset credits to its customers.  These allow companies that operate in markets that have carbon caps to offset any shortfalls in their carbon emissions.

According to the company’s web site, GER’s products are certified with the UTCS eco-mark.  UTCS is an acronym for Urban Tree Certification System.  A recent Reuters article states that GER developed the UTCS certification and describes it this way:

UTCS (urban tree certification system) is a NYS and internationally recognized urban forest management plan developed by GER CEO Joseph Murray.  UTCS certification system is a socially responsible and environmentally friendly methodology to recycle government approved forestry and non-forest industry generated waste wood.  UTCS includes chain of custody documentation (a tracking system from origin to end user) and 3rd party verifications of sourcing.

So GER certifies its own products, which is quite unusual.  I haven’t been able to find any independent verification of the UTCS certification mark, and the description from the Reuters article quoted above is from the “About Green Energy Resources” text which was probably taken from GER’s marketing materials.

A search of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office’s trademark database reveals that GER has not filed a trademark or certification mark application for UTCS.  Indeed, UTCS wouldn’t be eligible for federal certification mark registration because a certification mark is used not by its owner, but by others whose products or services are certified by the owner of the mark.

A recent Matter Network story about a New York dry cleaning business caught my attention.  Green Apple Cleaners (Green Apple), which has two locations in Manhattan and a third in Mahwah, New Jersey, uses environmentally-friendly Solvair Cleaning Systems to launder its clients’ clothes. 

The Solvair Cleaning System is owned by Illinois textile cleaning technology company R.R. Street & Co. (RRS) and covered by a family of RRS patents directed to cleaning systems using organic cleaning solvents and a pressurized fluid solvent. 

In the process disclosed by U.S. Patent Nos. 6,355,072, 6,736,859, 6,755,871 and 7,147,670, clothes are cleaned by an organic cleaning solvent in a perforated drum contained within a cleaning vessel, and the used solvent is extracted by rotating the drum at high speed.  The process then departs from conventional cleaning methods by removing residual solvent with a pressurized fluid instead of using an evaporative hot air drying cycle.

This is made possible because the organic cleaning solvent is soluble in the pressurized liquid solvent.  The pressurized fluid solvent is then transferred from the drum, and the vessel is de-pressurized so any remaining pressurized fluid solvent evaporates.  According to the patents, the result is less damage to both the clothes and the environment.

Green Apple also owns a federal registration for the GREEN APPLE CLEANERS mark (greenapplereg.pdf).  Interestingly, Green Apple’s eco-mark sailed through the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) in just eight months, avoiding the problems faced by other eco-marks such as GREEN BRANCH and GREEN PATENT BLOG.

Presumably, the PTO did not find GREEN APPLE CLEANERS merely descriptive of environmentally-friendly cleaning services because of the presence of the “APPLE” element in the mark.  This offers one lesson for applicants seeking federal registrations for eco-marks containing such eco-descriptive terms as GREEN or CLEAN:  add a non-descriptive, arbitrary word to your mark to spice things up and improve your chances of success in the PTO.

A couple of weeks ago, I responded to a first Office Action issued by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) in connection with the trademark application for GREEN PATENT BLOG (see my previous post about the Office Action).  As discussed previously, the trademark examiner rejected the application on the ground that the mark GREEN PATENT BLOG is “merely descriptive” of blogs that provide information on clean tech patents.

Under federal trademark case law a term is merely descriptive if it immediately conveys a significant characteristic of the goods or services for which the mark is being used.  On the other hand, if the consumer has to exercise “mature thought” or follow “a multi-stage reasoning process” to determine the product or service of the mark, then the mark is not merely descriptive. 

My argument in the response (gpbresponse.pdf) hinged on this immediacy requirement and focused primarily on the “green” component of the mark.  Specifically, GPB asserted that the mark does not immediately communicate the subject matter of the services because the term “green” has many meanings in addition to the environmental and clean tech definition, such as relating to plants or as a slang for money or finance.  

Moreover, some of those additional definitions comprise subject matter that, like clean tech, is the stuff of patents.  For example, plant patents are quite prevalent (think Monsanto, genetically-modified crops, etc.).  Financial services patents are common as well.

GPB also argued that determining the services provided under a mark containing “green” together with “patent” requires a reasoning process because most people do not associate ”green” characteristics (whether clean tech, money, plants or something else) with intellectual property law.

So advocate turned blogger turned blogger/advocate gave it his best shot.  In another few months, we’ll see how GPB did.

In February, I filed a trademark application (gpbapplication.pdf) in the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) for GREEN PATENT BLOG.  I figured I would compromise my credibility in matters of green intellectual property (IP) if I didn’t take available measures to protect my own green IP.

In the application, I avoided the trouble with eco-marks that I discussed in a couple of previous posts (see here and here).  That is, I drafted the listing of services to indicate their green aspect.  My listing is as follows:

ON-LINE JOURNALS, NAMELY, BLOGS FEATURING NEWS, INFORMATION AND LEGAL ANALYSIS RELATING TO INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW ISSUES IN THE CLEAN TECHNOLOGY AND RENEWABLE ENERGY INDUSTRIES

A few weeks ago, the PTO issued a first Office Action (gpboa.pdf) in which the trademark examiner rejected GREEN PATENT BLOG as ”merely descriptive” of blogs that provide information on green technology (a trademark can’t be registered with the PTO if it is a generic term or descriptive of goods or services because that would restrict competitors from conveying information about their goods or services). 

Specifically, the examiner noted that BLOG is generic for blogging services, and GREEN PATENT describes the subject matter of the blog.  The Office Action stated that GREEN describes things that involve clean technology or renewable energy, and PATENT is generic for a form of intellectual property.  Finally, the examiner attached some evidence of internet usage of “green patents” that he says shows that the term describes clean technology patents.

I will be formulating a response to the Office Action in the next week or two and will report on it once it’s filed.  But don’t worry - Green Patent Blog will fight the good fight.  I’ll go all the way to the Supreme Court if I have to.

The Dechert law firm’s annual report on trends in trademarks (which I accessed through this post on Greenbiz) came out in April, and its top story was the explosion of eco-mark applications received by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in 2007.  Among the report’s findings is that the number of marks including the word GREEN more than doubled from 1,100 in 2006 to 2,400 in 2007.  The phrase GO GREEN appeared in over 100 different proposed marks.  The word CLEAN was used in over 900 applications, and GREEN and CLEAN appeared together in 74 marks.  Over 50 different marks paired CLEAN with either FUEL, ENERGY or POWER.  The report also noted that marks including the prefix ECO more than doubled to almost 900.  ENVIRONMENT appeared in more than 450 marks, and ENERGY was used in almost 1200 marks.  The report is an interesting read, and the narrative on the ECO-products and services available to consumers is both hilarious and mind-boggling.  (see my previous posts on eco-marks here)