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

Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Just send every single tax filing both ways. The right one gets filed, and wrong one gets rejected. Twice the work for the government.

Re:Idea

[ZachPruckowski]

And then finally they'll get the bright idea to implement software that recognizes whether it's upside down and only print out the ones that are right-side up!

They can't implement that software because a method for doing that has already been patented!

Much though I dislike software patents, that doesn't prevent using text to detect orientation. Someone upthread came up with a solution that wouldn't violate that patent, namely OCRing all orientations and the one with the most dictionary words is the correct orientation.

The posted patent compares letter width to letter height, and uses that to determine if the image is sideways. If the document is all capital letters or in Russian, it looks at the 'T's in the document, otherwise it uses 'i's. It then figures the ratio of what appear to be correctly oriented 'T's or 'i's to incorrectly oriented 'T's or 'i's and uses that to determine whether or not the document is upside down.

To circumvent that, you could test something different. If using different letters and the same overall formula don't evade the patent, you could still use factors like frequency analysis ('b' and 'd' are more common in English than 'q' and 'p') or attempting to detect different known incorrect characters (there's no English letter that looks like a sideways 'b', 'd', 'p', or 'q' or an upside-down 'k' or 'h' or 'y' (though an upside-down 'y' looks like a backwards 'h')

Upside down or 180degrees?

[fiddlesticks]

Reading the FA, it could be that the faxer sent the fax the wrong way up/ down - so the office received a blank fax.

This would seem a perfectly valid reason to reject the submission

Re:I'm curious, who's the idiot?

[clone53421]

Not only that, but the reason they say that it must have been rotated, not upside-down, is because otherwise the response would have been “your submission was blank”.

No, not if they’ve seen it a million times before, it wouldn’t...

First day on the job:

“Your submission was blank.”
“No, it wasn’t!”
“It was.”
“It wasn’t. I’m looking at it now!”
“Well, could you have possibly put the pages into the document feeder upside-down by mistake?”
“...”
“...”
“...oops. I’ll re-send it.”

2nd day on the job:

“The faxed submission was received upside down.”
“So rotate them 180 degrees, dumbass!”
“...”