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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."
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.
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'm not sure why you would want to send your tax papers to the US Patent Office.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
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!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
My guess is that they don't print them any more, and it was a PITA to turn your entire monitor upside down!
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
http://milkshake.dexy.org
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/
Because some of my deductions are patently, umm, creative.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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;
}
I'm not sure why you would want to send your tax papers to the US Patent Office.
Three times the work!
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
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!”
“...”
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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')
I think you need to tighten up on your spelling.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!