USPTO Won't Accept Upside Down Faxes 427
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."
Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Idea (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Idea (Score:5, Funny)
Because some of my deductions are patently, umm, creative.
Re:Idea (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure why you would want to send your tax papers to the US Patent Office.
Three times the work!
Re:Idea (Score:5, Funny)
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 [freepatentsonline.com]!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [freepatentsonline.com]!
Much though I dislike software patents, that doesn't prevent using text to detect orientation. Someone upthread [slashdot.org] 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')
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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 [freepatentsonline.com]!
Much though I dislike software patents, that doesn't prevent using text to detect orientation. Someone upthread [slashdot.org] 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')
As someone mentioned in a patent-related posting recently on slashdot, the government is actually not bound by patent law - they can legally use any patented technology they need.
This is just a situation where some idiot at the patent office didn't know how to rotate a file, so they just made some rule that outlawed it because it was easier.
At least, I'm guessing, didn't RTFA. The point is they're not held back by patents.
-Taylor
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Gawd - good catch.
The number of dyslexic patent attorneys still in possession of a fax machine has probably dwindled to extinction.
You can and should file electronically. If you're still using an Underwood machine to prepare patents, you might not be on the cutting edge of innovation.
Here's the patent that blocking them (Score:5, Informative)
That one's just an application. Here's one they granted in 1994:
Rapid detection of page orientation
Re:Idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think you need to tighten up on your spelling.
But then no one would respond and I'm o so lonely down here...
My Personal War: (Score:5, Funny)
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While you're there, flush all the toilets at the same time. It'll put the entire patent office in a state of higgldy-piggldy (*).
(*) "higgldy-piggldy" means "a big mess"
- Milo
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Bloom County, how I miss you.
Re:My Personal War: (Score:4, Funny)
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Sadly, SCO claimed a patent on gentlemanly attire. Kudos to the USPTO for extending their service.
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If only... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
And when you do (Score:3, Funny)
Remember to also send the email to him right side up.....
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And if you send it by e-mail, make sure the bits are the right way up.
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don't forget "gopher" [blogspot.com]
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Print out the image.
Put the image in a copy machine UPSIDE DOWN.
The image will come out of the copy machine right side up!
Patent pending.
candy? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
lol - Sadly, it took me a little while to get it. :)
I can't mod you up... so I'll spam you up
Re:candy? (Score:5, Funny)
When they buy a bag of M&Ms do they throw away all the W, E and 3s too?
Why was that moded 'Funny'?
The other day, I went to Home Depot and bought nails. I get home, open the box, and what do I see?! Over half - HALF- of the fucking nails have the points on the wrong end!
Inconceivable!
Re:candy? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
could be, or they might just be twisted. You can untwist them by grabbing one in middle and walking in a half circle. If it's pointing the right way when you are done then the twisted nail has been fixed.
(this actually was a Sesame Street comedy routine)
Re:candy? (Score:4, Funny)
The same thing happened to me, but with plumbing parts. I have to buy a whole box of elbows to make sure I have enough "right turns" and enough "left turns". Home depot has got to get the quality control issues dealt with.
Sheldon
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Inconceivable!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
They Would Simply Rotate Them 180 Degrees ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They Would Simply Rotate Them 180 Degrees ... (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, one would hope that the Patent and Trademark office would be smart enough to realize that a 1987 patent expired in 2007.
Re:They Would Simply Rotate Them 180 Degrees ... (Score:5, Funny)
They would, except someone faxed them the memo informing them of that, and it was upside down.
use two reflections (Score:2)
They can avoid the patent. Rotating through 180 degrees is the same as two reflections, across (any) two perpendicular lines.
Re: (Score:2)
So you would want 89 degrees to the horizontal?
Only for vertical files. For flat files, you need a cabinet about 180 degrees to the horizontal.
How can I get a mail room job there. (Score:2)
I would just 'love' to work there now. Check each fax and for anything that is software turn the pages upside down and watch the fun.
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+(X) good idea.
(X) is as close as I can get to rendering the infinity symbol in a normal character set.
Re:How can I get a mail room job there. (Score:4, Funny)
+(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...
A possible explanation: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.pu deddom teg reven stnemmoc drawoc suomynona ym yhw s'taht oS
That's because... (Score:4, Funny)
...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...
This really should be filedd undeer "idle.. (Score:5, Insightful)
And I don't mean that in any sort of disrespectful way. This just seems more suited to the "idle" section for its absurdity.
In all seriousness... (Score:4, Funny)
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I actually think that is what the form letter is referring to. If more people on /. used their brains, well, it wouldn't be ./
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This attitude is becoming standard (Score:2)
Because the USPTO has all the power, they can decide on anything to cut down on the number of applicants.
The same thing is also happening in the job market with all the power in the hands of employers.
Post ideas here. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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It's called "convert the file to a PDF" and "hit Ctrl+R and OK" twice.
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Excuse me, it may be "Ctrl+Shift+R". Regardless, it should be a task even a federal bureaucrat can handle without a million dollar study on the project.
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most decent fax recieve servers already save as pdf. so step 1 is not needed.
Re:Post ideas here. (Score:5, Informative)
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;
}
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure there's another way around, but gocr on the top or bottom section wouldn't provide enough data to "overrule" the header / footer, and doing the whole document would be pretty wasteful of computing time...
Well, I just did 2 gocr runs (with defaults) on a fax and its rotation, took about 4 seconds total on a VM sitting on a fairly over-subscribed box. The rotation itself took a negligible amount of time. Not implemented any automatic detection but what would be the overhead there?
There were about 5 dictionary words correctly recognised in the right-way-up version (with a lot of partial recognitions) and a lot of junk in the upside-down. I'm wondering now if there are easily recognised patterns in the junk wit
umop apisdn (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
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Is rotating the images manually based on text so much view?
In irfanview: [r][r][s][enter]
Or are your clerks too stupid to recognize rotated text and need software to recognize it for them?
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Or are your clerks too stupid to recognize rotated text and need software to recognize it for them?
Why should our tax dollars pay for some clerk to spend 5 seconds per page of a 100 page document to flip every image, when it's the $500/hour attorney who screwed things up and who should refile, at his or her own expense?
Re:Post ideas here. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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simple reason. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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So if the OCR step fails, rotate the image and retry the OCR. If it fails again it was unreadable, so you'd need to manually intervene anyway.
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So if the OCR step fails, rotate the image and retry the OCR. If it fails again it was unreadable, so you'd need to manually intervene anyway.
Sure, and you want to pay for a government employee to do that? I don't. Make the $500/hour patent attorney refile his or her papers if they weren't properly filed the first time. They get paid enough that they should fix their own mistakes.
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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.
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
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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
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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 o
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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
Upside down or 180degrees? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Then wouldn't the reason be "we received a blank page"?
Re:Upside down or 180degrees? (Score:5, Informative)
Update: There is now a discussion on the article that covers this very topic. Someone theorized that the USPTO received blank pages (meaning that "upside down" meant "back to front".
The author's reply:
According to the people involved, that is not the case. The page was simply put in bottom side first. Otherwise, the response would have been that the received fax was blank.
I see the game here... (Score:2)
It is good to know they cut costs down. (Score:2)
I am glad in this instance they are paying attention to costs. Imagine how much it would cost to rotate the entire post office every time a fax comes in the wrong orientation and rotate it back when it comes in the correct orientation. Good for them th
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I don't think I've ever seen a signature that is so perfectly apropos to the subject of the post before. :)
Cost cutting measures (Score:2)
1. Person (Govt Employee) needs to get up from his chair
2. Walk towards the Fax machine
3. Collect the papers
4. Walk back towards his/her cubicle
5. Sit down
If people are sending fax upside down, the person has to perform an extra step of rotating the pages. By cutting that step, the govt is saving enormous amount of money. Also think about dealing with Govt
In a similar fashion (Score:2)
next time you're at McDonalds (or whatever), while the person is filling your order, rotate the tray.
What I mean is, they'll probably put the burguer or soda first, then the fries, when there's only the first item in your tray, rotate it.
have fun
Is it patented? no, seriously (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Found one (Score:3, Informative)
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 [freepatentsonline.com].)
well, duh ! (Score:2)
that's because rotating the image of a fax is patented and they can't afford the license !
That's the trouble with them new-fangled doo-dads (Score:2)
Well I guess they use fax to promote the fact that they are the center of all innovation after all.
Perhaps I should submit a "rotator" device for a patent. You takes the piece of paper in one rotator on the
Wrong Question (Score:2)
Alteration? (Score:3, Interesting)
Original link appears to be down (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Fairly Normal (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:professionals (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't the patent office insisting on professionalism, it is the patent office insisting on bureaucratic nonsense.
Re:Call the whambulance! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes I do.
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My guess is they aren't processing them on paper but have some computer system that takes the incoming faxes and for beuracratic reasons they can't get said computer system fixed.
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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?
How is this saving our tax money?
Option 1:
- Find the form letter that says the original FAX was sent upside down (call that 30 seconds if it happens a lot).
- Fill out the details of the recipient and get the recipient's FAX number (1-2 minutes).
- FAX out a copy to the recipient (1 minute).
- Fill out the rejection paperwork (assuming a few minutes).
- Eventually receive the replacement document.
- File paperwork.
Option 2:
- Hit fucking "page rotate". Twic
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While this rule may seem silly there is one good thing about the USPTO... NONE of your tax money is being wasted. The USPTO is 100% self funded by fees paid by customers. In fact, Congress has actually stolen money that the USPTO gets from customers and used it for other (probably more wasteful) spending in the past, although this practice has been greatly reduced in recent years.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Family Guy (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, come on.
http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/2009/ga091120.gif [ucomics.com] is an absolute classic. And the mice sequences are consistently good. http://images.ucomics.com/comics/ga/2009/ga090324.gif [ucomics.com]
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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"?
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*ducks*
I'm curious, who's the idiot? (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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Re:I'm curious, who's the idiot? (Score:5, Interesting)
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!”
“...”
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Meaning the fax that comes through on the other side is mostly just blank sheets.
So... are you saying that the PTO has been giving out patents for blank pages all this time? Wow that explains a lot!