USPTO Won't Accept Upside Down Faxes

bizwriter writes "This may seem like a joke, but it's not. The US Patent and Trademark Office will not accept patent filings faxed in if they arrive upside down. That's right, the home of innovation of the federal government is incapable of rotating an incoming fax file, whether electronically or on paper."

Comments

A possible explanation:

[Mashdar]

My guess is that they don't print them any more, and it was a PITA to turn your entire monitor upside down!

Call the whambulance!

[0xdeadbeef]

I'm supposed to feel outrage because a government office wants to save our tax money by requiring people (lawyers) too stupid to use a fax machine to correct their own mistakes?

Re:Call the whambulance!

[L4t3r4lu5]

When your tax money is being used to pay for the phone call / ISP fees / time of the staff involved in informing the sender of the issue instead of rotating a piece of paper 180 degrees in their hand, yes.

Yes I do.

This really should be filedd undeer "idle..

[IANAAC]

I just can't see any insightful or interesting comments coming from this, much less the story itself.

And I don't mean that in any sort of disrespectful way. This just seems more suited to the "idle" section for its absurdity.

simple reason.

[will_die]

Since they have a form letter for this it is more then just turing the paper around. So just applying technical thinking I can think of three quick reasons.
1) The don't print them out and instead file them electronicly. OCR software would have problems with documents that have some parts upside down.
2) They apply some additional printing, barcode, date, etc that is used when storing the documents. Having info upside down would cause the info to be in the wrong place when human start handling it since they would want it in a readable order.
3) Pages are printed on both sides, same basic problems as 2.

Overall a none story unless FAX is the only way they accept the paperwork and in that case it is a matter of WTF are they still using faxes for.

Re:simple reason.

[pbhj]

I'm guessing as part of the receipt process, these are legal docs after all, the incoming facsimile pages are immediately stamped and barcoded automatically. Then you have a problem, you can't tamper with the docs and remove the stamp as this is a legal notation of receipt. You can't modify the incoming doc and then stamp it as unaltered from that received as that would be a minor fraud.

When you digitise and rotate so the docs are readable onscreen the tagging and barcodes are now misplaced - print a header page and it can no longer be automatically checked for barcodes/ receipt stamps without checking in 2 places and processing further. Moreover the space in the forms for the stamping is not being used and instead the stamp is probably covering informational parts of the doc.

The alternative is to handle incoming faxes manually. If someone chooses to file their document or amendments by fax and their patent is a few hundred pages long then this is going to be a pretty silly thing to do manually, especially as the manual stamping of the docs is going to need to be checked and will require more machine processing to read than if it had been automated in the first place.

Seems reasonable.

Re:simple reason.

[b4dc0d3r]

The recipient fax usually prints off some relevant information in the margins. If the document were rotated, it could overwrite this data, or make it harder to find. In the case of quasi-legible printing, it's important to know that you're looking at it the correct way.

Put it this way. If we ever switch to first-to-file, you're going to want a good record of when you faxed something. Or someone contests your patent based on prior art around the time if your submission. Or lots of reasons.

Everything on the page should be right side up at the same time, including marks made by the recipient fax. It's a technicality, but makes for consistent documentation. And if they politely let you know you goofed, you can try again.

I don't read it as being "upside down" top to bottom, as in faxing the back of the paper, I read it as "upside down" when looking at the paper as a two-dimensional grid. So nobody need argue with me on that.

Re:simple reason.

[Theaetetus]

Nope, I'm a patent practitioner.

Figures. This site is for people who know about computers.

Yeah. Including people who design and build them, then get tired of that and branch off into law. It's not just a site for helpdesk monkeys.

If half the pages are upside down, you think it won't cost much money for the USPTO to check and flip each one, rather than just notifying me once that the filing wasn't accepted?

Can't you get it into your thick skull that it's possible to automate that. I'm not the only person who's told you that.

Can't you get it into your thick skull that the cost of doing that is the same, with or without the rotation, because the rotation can be automated?

And you apparently place no value on your time or CPU cycles. A computer hobbyist such as yourself probably doesn't realize it, but when you scale up to systems handling hundreds of thousands of pages a day, automated processing still requires time and money, and that time and money should be applied on the front end, by the people like me who are being well paid to do it, rather than by a government agency.

Re:simple reason.

[Dachannien]

It's good to see that somebody around here actually thinks instead of spewing forth uninformed garbage across the tubes.

The department in question handles the legal documentation which forms a record of the assignment of rights in a patent or trademark to another party. Much as with land deed records or other such documentation, the sanctity of these documents must be preserved when they are recorded. That limits the options available for modifying the documents.

Documentation relating to the prosecution of applications (which this isn't) can be entered into the file wrapper regardless of what direction it was placed into the sending fax machine. If necessary, an examiner annoyed with a document showing up upside down when they open it at their workstation can (a) rotate the view temporarily or (b) ask the support staff to rotate the image permanently.

Upside down could mean wrong sheet face up

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible that the faxes were received face down so they were getting the back of the page? Just a thought...

Is it patented? no, seriously

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Everyone's going to make this smart ass joke, but there's actually a serious question here.

The USPTO grants patents for utter nonsense. Then, to maintain credibility, they have to abide by the law saying that all those nonsense things are illegal for 20 years.

If someone during a board meeting pointed out that rotating electronically received data communications was patented, the board would be required to decide to stop doing that (or license the patent, but maybe they can't, or maybe the patent holder said no).

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

What if............. they ask the patent holder to issue a patent license.............. You know, the process that is half the point of the USPTO.............. That might work...................

Re:professionals

[maxume]

This isn't the patent office insisting on professionalism, it is the patent office insisting on bureaucratic nonsense.

umop apisdn

[Rockoon]

Note the lack of reading comprehension in the replies here so far.

To automatically detect that the document is upside down might also create false positives: documents that are right side up being flagged as being upside down.


The title of this comment, "umop apisdn", is upside down. How many people caught that vs how many thought that it was gibberish?

Re:professionals

[Anonymous Coward]

The faxes are received electronically so the same side is always up. There is no reason that we should be wasting tax payer dollars for someone to go through the electronic files and rotate every other page, every page, or any other combination of idiocy. If you can't fax a document, then you don't deserve a patent.

Re:Post ideas here.

[Anonymous Coward]

read the top 10 lines, if header exist, run OCR, if it doesn't recognize, rotate. If no fax header consider it SPAM and grant no patent.

Re:Post ideas here.

[Tisha_AH]

A few years ago I worked for a CLEC (phone company) and we received ASR's (service requests) from other phone companies by FAX. It was all electronic documents that were automatically converted by OCR into a standard format.

On occasion we would get an ASR that was sent in upside down (top to bottom) and the OCR program could not cope with it. As we were only dealing with a few dozen of these a day it was easy to rotate the image as they were all stored in PDF format.

The patent office deals with hundreds or thousands of applications a day, some percentage come in by FAX. I imagine that either they do not want to spend the staff hours to rotate documents for storage or reading or this is a holdover from the bureaucratic, arcane ways of the patent process.

If you have ever filed a patent (successfully) you are aware that there are some weird requirements for formatting.

I'm curious, who's the idiot?

[RingDev]

Now, if it is true that the PTO is incapable of rotating a piece of paper, that is sad news indeed. BUT, usually when someone is accused of faxing a document "UPSIDE-DOWN" it means that they have placed the paper with the content side facing away from the scanner. Meaning the fax that comes through on the other side is mostly just blank sheets.

With out the full story here, it sure seems like the sender is just bragging about his inability to use a fax machine...

-Rick

Re:Post ideas here.

[aGuyNamedJoe]

To me it seems bizarre that in 2010 we are using electronic document preparation software -- MS Word, for instance -- to prepare a document. We then [print it,] fax it, [scan it,] and feed it to optical character recognition software in order to get it back into some semblance of the original, probably with a few extra errors caused by the low fidelity of faxes.

Is it really not possible to use email for document transmission?

Re:Idea

[mweather]

You're right, they buy software from companies that license patents, just like everyone else.

Fairly Normal

[Artagel]

I practice before the USPTO. This kind of thing is fairly common for the agency. Actually, I am pretty blase about this one. But that tells you what kind of organization it is, I guess. I lost may capacity for outrage years ago.