Do you know how to remove PDF hyperlinks from your Trademark Letter of Protest evidence? You should! Here’s how to do it.

(Oops! This post lacks a proper introduction. To learn what a Letter of Protest is and why I write about them, read these Top 10 Letter of Protest Facts.)

USPTO rules state that PDFs uploaded as evidence for a Letter of Protest should not contain active links.

Tricky, because each page of evidence must be annotated with the source URL and date of collection. Fireshot and some other tools add this information automatically. But depending on settings the URL may not be complete. Which means adding the URL manually as a text annotation.

Guess what? If you do that, you’ve just added an active link to the page!

Are you with me so far? Great!

So once the URL is added as a text annotation (use Tools>Annotate>Text), you’ll need to remove the hyperlink.

Adobe offers this feature, but I don’t have Adobe. I do, however, have a brain and Google.

So I googled: “remove embedded links from pdf online”.

There are many free options available. I used the first one listed today, PDFdu.com:

It worked like a charm!

If you failed to do this on a past Letter of Protest, don’t panic. Just be sure to do it going forward.

Yours for Quality Trademark Registrations and Free Markets,

Morgan