Section 8 declaration

Due between the fifth and sixth year after registration, then with each renewal. It requires a specimen showing current use. This is the most commonly missed deadline in trademark ownership, and missing it cancels a perfectly valid registration.

This is the filing that quietly kills more registrations than any refusal does. The USPTO does not remind you the way a domain registrar does, and the deadline arrives five years after the excitement of registering has worn off. A perfectly valid, actively used trademark is cancelled for nothing more than nobody having diarised it.

The registration is cancelled. Not suspended, not lapsed pending payment - cancelled. You would have to apply again from scratch, pay again, and go through examination again, and in the meantime anything you built on that registration, including marketplace brand programmes, stops resting on anything.

1. Find your registration date. The first Section 8 is due between the fifth and sixth anniversary of that date, not of your filing date.
2. Check you can still prove use for every class on the registration. If you have stopped selling in one, that class usually has to be deleted rather than declared.
3. Collect a current specimen for each class, showing the mark as actually used today.
4. Diary the later deadlines now: the combined Section 8 and 9 renewal falls between the ninth and tenth year, then every ten years after that.

A brand registers, grows, rebrands its packaging slightly in year three, and files its Section 8 in year six with a specimen showing the new packaging. Because the mark on the packaging has drifted from the mark as registered, the declaration is questioned - and the problem only surfaces at the one moment the registration is vulnerable.