Trademark Trial and Appeal Board

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) is a body within the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) responsible for hearing and deciding certain kinds of cases involving trademarks. These include appeals from decisions by USPTO Examiners denying registration of marks, and opposition proceedings filed against trademark applications. TTAB panels hear hundreds of claims each year asserting that trademarks should not be registered because they are generic, disparaging, or confusingly similar to existing marks. Such challenges to registration are initially considered by trademark examining attorneys, whose judgment may be appealed to the TTAB. Decisions of the TTAB may, in turn, be appealed to a United States district court, or the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

The TTAB is also responsible for hearing certain kinds of inter partes proceedings, including oppositions to registration, cancellation proceedings against registered marks, and concurrent use proceedings where a party alleges its mark is entitled to joint registration, carving geographic territory out of that held by a registered mark.

Practices and procedures for litigating before the TTAB are published in the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board Manual of Procedure, commonly known as the "TBMP".

Judges of the TTAB are appointed by the United States Secretary of Commerce in consultation with the Director of the USPTO. From 1999 to 2009, a change in the statute permitted a number of TTAB judges to be appointed by the USPTO Director, but this arrangement was challenged as unconstitutional under Article Two, Section 2, clause 2 of the Constitution (the Appointments Clause), which permits the United States Congress to "vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments". Congress addressed this by passing a 2008 amendment which specifies that the Secretary of Commerce is responsible for such appointments, and permitting the Secretary to retroactively appoint those persons named by the USPTO Director. There are currently twenty-six judges sitting at the TTAB [as of January 2017].

...
Wikipedia