The USPTO recently announced it had now removed over 50,000 goods and services from the trademark register. Using ex parte expungement and reexamination proceedings, the majority of the cancellations were used against registrations linked to specimen farms.
Trademark registration requires that marks be used in real-life commerce. Specimens of the marks must be provided to the USPTO to demonstrate commercial usage prior to registration. This would serve to show a legitimate connection between the mark and the goods and services provided.
Specimen farms are websites designed to look like commercial sites. These sites list the products and the marks, which are used as specimens provided to the PTO. But the sites don’t actually sell the product.
There are filing firms, companies that assist in filing trademark applications, that created these e-commerce sites purely for the purpose of creating fake specimens.
Clearly the registry of these unused goods and services helps open up the path for legitimate companies and trademarks.