PTO Declares Dead UHDA Application to Register ‘Mobile HDR Premium’ Logo

The Patent and Trademark Office declared dead the UHD Alliance’s application to register the “Mobile HDR Premium” certification logo for smartphones, tablets and laptops, said the agency’s Dec. 27 abandonment notice. It gives the alliance two months to petition PTO to "revive" or reinstate the application. The alliance introduced the logo and certification program with much fanfare at last year’s Mobile World Congress for high-resolution, high-dynamic-range battery-operated devices because they’re a “primary mode of video consumption” and a “key component of the rapidly expanding Ultra HD ecosystem" (see 1702280045). The alliance filed a Feb. 27 application to register the logo as a "certification mark," but a PTO examiner rejected it in a May 23 notice for several flaws, including its lack of a “disclaimer” that the alliance would make no claim to the “exclusive right” to use the words, “Mobile HDR Premium,” apart from the logo. That's because the wording “merely describes an ingredient, quality, characteristic, function, feature, purpose [of] applicant’s goods and/or services that will be certified, and thus is an unregistrable component of the mark,” said the agency, which gave the alliance six months to appeal the examiner's decision or fix the application's flaws. PTO officially killed the application about a month after the November deadline lapsed without an alliance response. "We have every intention to absolutely retain the trademark for Mobile HDR Premium," alliance President Mike Fidler told us Monday. Fidler, who took the job last summer (see 1708140048), declined further comment until he consulted with alliance trademark attorneys about why the PTO application was allowed to lapse. Mobile HDR Premium still appeared Tuesday as a TM-designated logo for an unregistered, but applied-for certification mark at the top of the home page of the alliance’s consumer-facing website, ExperienceUHD.com, which also listed Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones as the only mobile devices qualifying for the certification.