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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."
Just send every single tax filing both ways. The right one gets filed, and wrong one gets rejected. Twice the work for the government.
I practice civil disobedience by sneaking into the patent office and quickly rotating the faxes upside down...
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
If only there were some unique invention they could license that was capable of such a process as rotating a piece of paper or an electronic image... Excuse me, I feel an urgent need to contact a patent attorney.
Remember to also send the email to him right side up.....
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
When they buy a bag of M&Ms do they throw away all the W, E and 3s too?
... but unfortunately they granted a patent on that in 1987 and don't have the money for the absurd licensing fee the patent holder is asking. Unfortunately the "novel" method patented covers both clockwise and counterclockwise but they're currently looking into rotating them 179 degrees, making the document slightly slanted but avoiding royalties.
My work here is dung.
My guess is that they don't print them any more, and it was a PITA to turn your entire monitor upside down!
...turning the page over would breach US Patent #65535 "Method and process for static image manipulation by manual substrate reorientation" and probably also the nototiously over-broad US Patents #55378008 "Process for Bi-manual gluteous maximus location" and #45056 "Method for organising mass inebriation events at a beverage fermentation facility".
They do have to follow their own rules, you know...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
And I don't mean that in any sort of disrespectful way. This just seems more suited to the "idle" section for its absurdity.
But wait, if you send it upside down, won't it arrive blank?
Can I mod something +1 Scary if it's true but I wish it weren't?
I work at a federal regulatory agency which is having the same issue. They were asking IT/tech/computer people if there was a solution around. Nobody knew of any software that auto rotates images based on text. Anybody? Reply here.
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.
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
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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.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
It's just like reading newspaper comics to other people. None of the effect and none of the humor.
"Y'see in this next panel Garfield is asleep, it's funny because Garfield is lazy and it's typical of his behavior. Now in the next panel he opens one eye and he says 'Mondays'. Which as you recall from last week when I read this comic to you, Garfield expressed his disdain for that particular day of the week. Interesting side note, the name 'Monday' actually comes from 'Moon Day'. Perhaps Garfield used to have some involvement in the space program. SO anyway..."
I have nothing compelling to say
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).
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
This isn't the patent office insisting on professionalism, it is the patent office insisting on bureaucratic nonsense.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You will never convince me that there's anything approaching humour in a Garfield comic.
How would they differentiate that from just receiving a blank page (or a transmission error, or their own machine running out of toner or ink if it's a paper FAX machine).
Wouldn't the correct reply simply be "we got a blank page, so there's nothing to file, please resend"?
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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?
"His name was James Damore."
Ah, come on.
http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/2009/ga091120.gif is an absolute classic. And the mice sequences are consistently good. http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/2009/ga090324.gif
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
+(X) good idea.
(X) is as close as I can get to rendering the infinity symbol in a normal character set.
You could use '8'. Oh, wait, some people don't know how to rotate it...
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That one's just an application. Here's one they granted in 1994:
Rapid detection of page orientation
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
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
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I found one patent they granted that they might be worried about:
(And a poster higher up found this application, which is still in the examination phase: 20090274392: page orientation detection based on selective character recognition.)
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Could it be that the USPTO flipping the image constitutes altering the image?
Beware of the Leopard.
Why are you telling me that my document is "upside down"? In a routine fax transmission, page orientation (top of the page first into the machine or bottom of the page first) is not critical because the reader can easily flip and arrange the pages to read them top to bottom. However, it is critical to our process that each page is faxed top to bottom with the top margin being fed first into the machine. Once they have been received in PTAS, fax transmitted assignments are processed strictly by electronic means. Although the PTAS software can rotate a document 180 degrees for viewing purposes, when the electronic document is extracted to generate the archival microfilm record, each page is extracted exactly as it was first received. Accordingly, a document sent "upside down" would be microfilmed upside down. To further complicate matters, because the system generated recordation and reel and frame markings on the pages would be in the opposite orientation, the resulting document would be difficult to read.
Pretend I said something meaningful or insightful here.
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.
While I agree with most posters here that it's a silly rule I would point out that the fax header orientation in this case is opposite of the body orientation. If what is in the header is important to the USPTO (timestamp?) they may have a minor point.