Doppel Cited USPTO 5055675 Under Penalty of Perjury. The Mark Covers \"Temporary Rental of Surgical Equipment.\" We Don't Rent Surgical Equipment.

May 6, 2026 · DugganUSA LLC

Earlier today we published two posts on the Doppel takedown notice that landed at 05:16 UTC and the disclosure-economics math behind it. This is a third post and it is the shortest of the three. It exists because we did one piece of homework Doppel's takedown bot did not do.

We looked up the trademark registration Doppel cited.

In the body of the notice, Doppel listed:

Trademarked Symbol: MEDTRONIC Registration Number: 5055675 Registration Office: USPTO

That is the registration whose existence Doppel attested to under penalty of perjury as the basis for demanding removal of our blog post warning Medtronic about the cross-tenant helpdesk impersonation chain Microsoft Security confirmed three days ago.

We pulled USPTO Registration 5055675 from the Trademark Status and Document Retrieval system at tsdr.uspto.gov. Here is what is on file.

What USPTO 5055675 Actually Covers

Word Mark: MEDTRONIC. Standard character mark.

Owner: Medtronic, Inc., 710 Medtronic Parkway, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55432-5604.

Filing date: June 26, 2015. Registration date: October 4, 2016. Status: LIVE. Register: Principal. International Class: 044. US Class: 100, 101. Class status: ACTIVE. First use in commerce: August 16, 2005.

Goods and services, verbatim from the TSDR record:

"providing temporary rental of surgical and medical equipment"

That is the entire scope of the registration. One Class. One service. The temporary rental of surgical and medical equipment. International Class 044 is the Nice Classification bucket for medical and veterinary services, as distinct from medical and surgical instruments themselves (which fall under Class 010).

DugganUSA is a Minneapolis-based threat intelligence company. We do not rent surgical equipment. We do not rent medical equipment. We do not rent equipment of any kind. We publish security research and operate a STIX feed.

Why This Matters

Trademark infringement under the Lanham Act, codified at 15 USC 1114 and 15 USC 1125, requires three elements. The defendant must (1) use the mark in commerce (2) in connection with goods or services covered by the registration or related goods or services consumers would associate with the mark (3) in a manner likely to cause consumer confusion as to source, sponsorship, affiliation, or origin.

An editorial blog post identifying a publicly-traded medical-device manufacturer in connection with a confirmed breach is not "use in commerce in connection with the temporary rental of surgical and medical equipment." The class scope of the cited registration does not cover the alleged infringing use, and consumers reading a security blog post titled "Microsoft Just Published the Vish Chain We Warned Medtronic About" would not associate the post with the rental of surgical equipment.

Prong (2) fails on its face. The cited registration does not provide the trademark-rights basis Doppel asserted, under penalty of perjury, that it provides.

This is independent of, and additional to, the nominative fair use defense we covered in the first post (New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, 971 F.2d 302, 9th Cir. 1992). Nominative fair use protects editorial use of trademarked names that satisfy a three-prong test and would defeat the notice on its own. But before nominative fair use even comes into play, the trademark theory has to be colorable on the face of the cited registration. It is not. Doppel cited a registration that covers a service we are not providing.

The Bot's Mistake

Medtronic, Inc. has approximately 1,666 trademark applications and registrations on file at the USPTO across decades of branding work. The MEDTRONIC mark itself is registered in multiple classes and as multiple word and design variants. Doppel's takedown pipeline appears to have selected one registration — number 5055675 — without confirming whether the registration's class scope had any plausible relationship to the use complained of.

The pattern is consistent with SELECT TOP 1 reg_number FROM trademarks WHERE word_mark = 'MEDTRONIC'. It is not consistent with legal review.

The error is not a typo. The error is the bot pinning a "penalty of perjury" attestation to a registration whose actual scope it did not check. That is a category of error that scales with the volume of automated notices being generated, and it is the same category of error that produced the takedown demand against the post warning Medtronic about its own breach.

What Every Other Doppel Notice Now Faces

The same audit we just performed on USPTO 5055675 can be performed on every other registration Doppel has ever cited. Pull the registration. Read the goods and services. Compare to the alleged infringing use. If the class scope does not cover the use complained of, the notice fails on the merits before any defense is raised.

For any independent researcher, journalist, or competitor that has received a Doppel takedown demand, the audit takes about ten minutes per notice using the public USPTO TSDR system. The registration number is in the body of the notice. The TSDR record is free to pull. The class scope is not negotiable; it is what is on file at the federal trademark office.

For Doppel customers reading this, the same applies in reverse. Every notice your vendor sends in your name carries your name on the certification. If the cited registration does not cover the use complained of, your name is on the false certification. The "penalty of perjury" language is theirs to defend. The reputational and legal exposure is yours to absorb.

The Combined Picture

Doppel's notice this morning failed on three independent grounds, in escalating order of difficulty for them:

One, the perjury attestation imports the DMCA 17 USC 512(c)(3)(A)(vi) ritual into a trademark notice that has no statutory perjury hook. Procedurally novel.

Two, the cited registration (USPTO 5055675) covers the temporary rental of surgical and medical equipment. We do not rent surgical equipment. The cited authority does not cover the alleged use. Substantively absent.

Three, even if the cited registration had been properly scoped, nominative fair use under New Kids v. News America Publishing defeats any colorable trademark theory in editorial contexts that satisfy the three-prong test, which this post does. Doctrinally precluded.

Each of those three independently defeats the notice. Doppel sent it anyway. They sent it under penalty of perjury. They sent it in their customer Medtronic's name. They sent it at 05:16 UTC against the only public record warning Medtronic about its own breach. They CC'd Medtronic on the suppression demand. They simultaneously fired an identical notice at Cloudflare Trust and Safety with Report ID c50f19abd4ff7e29.

We are not removing the post. We are not removing the second post. We are publishing this third post. We will publish their response.

Receipts

USPTO Registration 5055675 full record: tsdr.uspto.gov/statusview/rn5055675

Class 044 (medical and veterinary services) Nice Classification scope: wipo.int/classifications/nice

Lanham Act 15 USC 1114, 1125 trademark infringement elements: legal-information-institute.cornell.edu

New Kids on the Block v. News America Publishing, 971 F.2d 302 (9th Cir. 1992): nominative fair use three-prong test

Doppel takedown notice as received 05:16 UTC: published in full in our previous posts, also on file at research/doppel/takedown-notice-2026-05-06.txt and research/doppel/cloudflare-notice-2026-05-06.txt

— Patrick Duggan DugganUSA LLC, Minneapolis

Aye.

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