Welcome to Feathers!

Have you ever gone to the US Patent & Trademark Office's "TARR" web page to check the status of a trademark application? Have you tired of typing in the same serial number day after day on that web page to obtain the current status of a trademark application?

Then you may wish to try our free Feathers® software. The Feathers software lets you build up a list of the US trademark applications and registrations which you would like to monitor. You can run the software to obtain the status of each application and registration. Later, you can run the software again, and it will tell you what changes there have been to the status of the applications and registrations.

The software can automatically send an email notification to one or more email addresses whenever the status of an application or registration changes. The software will also create a web (HTML) page which you may choose to place on an intranet web site for easy viewing and searching by persons within your organization.

To obtain the software, you can simply download the file to your computer. (You may need to shift-click to download the file. The file is about 350K so it may take several minutes or more to download.) Make careful note of the directory in your computer to which you have downloaded the file. Then run the file "feathers.exe" which you have downloaded, which will install the software to your system. (The installation program asks you to choose where to store various things, and we suggest you use the default values provided by the installation program.) You will then be asked to restart your computer, after which the installation program finishes.

Then run the program "Feathers" by clicking on its icon on your desktop.

Next, you will be asked to provide some configuration information. After that, you can enter the trademark application numbers and registration numbers that you would like to monitor. The Feathers software can then check the status of those trademark records, displaying its findings on the screen. It will also email the findings to you and will create a web page showing the findings. We look forward to finding out what you think of our Feathers software!

If you would like to learn more about the software before trying it, feel free to look at the user manual and help file.

Feathers lets you monitor the status of US trademark applications. We have also prepared free software called Goosefeathers which monitors Canadian trade-mark applications. In addition, we have free software called Partridge which may be used to monitor the status of US patent applications. We also have prepared free software called Raptor which monitors US Express Mail filings.

We have set up an email listserver for users of Feathers. This permits users of Feathers to post their questions and to discuss the software. To subscribe or unsubscribe, or to learn how to post to the discussion group, see this page.

You can also subscribe to the E-trademarks-L list.

Frequently asked questions about the Feathers software

• I am getting a message "Some selected entries were not updated." As you know, the "Feathers" software works by repeatedly visiting the TARR web site of the US Patent and Trademark Office. It sends a query (such as "please tell me about serial number 09/123,456") and TARR sends a response, which Feathers uses to make its database and its report to you. The problem being that sometimes TARR fails to send a response. And after a while, Feathers gives up. When you get the message "Some selected entries were not updated," the first thing to try is asking Feathers to update again. It will only update the records for which it had not already received an update today. This means the second attempt to update won't take more than a couple of minutes, since hopefully the entries that were not updated are few in number. With a bit of luck, you will then get the happy message that "all entries have been updated". The other possibility, of course, is that you will do a second update and still be told "Some selected entries were not updated." Then you might want to try a third update. If three updates don't work, then probably nothing will. You could try going directly to TARR (instead of using Feathers to retrieve TARR information), but probably you will present your serial number query to TARR and you will not get any response at all. The same thing may happen to you that happened to Feathers. Why would TARR fail to respond? Sometimes when TARR fails to respond timely, it is simply because lots of other people are visiting TARR and this is slowing down the TARR server. This is a sort of a random problem, not tied to any particular serial number. Updating a second or perhaps third time should have no difficulty eventually getting updates for all of your serial numbers if this is the problem. Other times, TARR will keep failing on a particular serial number again and again, even though all the other serial numbers in your Feathers database are updating just fine. In that case, it seems you have little choice but to give up and try it again tomorrow. In my experience, the problem rarely lasts more than a day or two.
• What is the function and purpose of the "rules" file?
• What's with the name "Feathers"? The name is meant to be somewhat silly. Perhaps you can guess why we chose this name.
• Why is Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC distributing this software? We developed it in the hope that people would find it useful -- we certainly have found it useful.
• What should I, a user, do if I have problems or suggestions with the software? The normal first step should be to post a question at the Feathers listserv. (See instructions above as to how to subscribe to the listserv.)