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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.
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?
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/
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.
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.
Run gocr on the document (run 1), rotate it 180 degrees and run gocr on that (run 2).
If (no of dictionary words(run 2) > no of dictionary words(run 1)) {
doc = rotated doc;
}
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.
Tisha Hayes
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