An unlikely attempt to trademark seo

I admit to being a latecomer to this story. I didn't hear about it until late May 2008. It seems to have hit the full general radar of the SEO community in early April, thanks to Sarah Bird. This intrepid young attorney was workings on trademarks for SEOmoz, when she discovered that person was trying to registry "SEO" as a service mark.

"I was shocked," she wrote in a blog entry on SEOmoz. She discovered that he'd passed the prelim review by the hallmark Office's reviewing attorney, and made it to the publication stage. This put the enrollment "in a sort of wait period during which people who would be harmed by the enrollment can file an expostulation with the hallmark Office," Bird explained.

We've passed the filing deadline for that, but Bird and several others did in fact file Notices of resistance to Gambert's attempt to hallmark the term. Gambert missed a May 19th deadline to file responses to their notices. In response to this lack of response, on May 27 (right after commemoration Day), Bird filed a movement for Default Judgment - fundamentally a petition to be granted a triumph because the other party failed to respond.

At this point, Gambert got his act jointly - sort of. He filed a 41-page response to the Notices of resistance on the same day that Bird filed her movement for Default Judgment. Bird takes many of his statement apart in a blog post she makes on the subject. By the time this article is published, she may have responded  to each and every one of the points he makes (or tries to make) in a more official manner, in a legal document to be filed with the Trademark Office.

Or not. I am definitely not a trademark or any other kind of lawyer, so for all I know that may not be necessary, since Gambert did not actually miss his deadline. In any case, though, this is where we stand right now. How did we get to such a state?