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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday May 26 2021, @01:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the vendor-capture dept.

There are still a few months to fix this, but for now the US Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) Acting Commissioner for Patents, Andrew Faile, and Chief Information Officer, Jamie Holcombe, have announced that starting January 1st, 2022, the USPTO will institute a surcharge for applicants that are not locked into Microsoft products via the proprietary DOCX format. From that date onwards, the USPTO will move away from PDF and require all filers to use that proprietary format or face an arbitrary surcharge when filing.

First, we delayed the effective date for the non-DOCX surcharge fee to January 1, 2022, to provide more time for applicants to transition to this new process, and for the USPTO to continue our outreach efforts and address customer concerns. We've also made office actions available in DOCX and XML formats and further enhanced DOCX features, including accepting DOCX for drawings in addition to the specification, claims, and abstract for certain applications.

One out of several major problems with the plans is that DOCX is a proprietary format. There are several variants of DOCX and each of them are really only supported by a single company's products. Some other products have had progress in beginning to reverse engineering it, but are hindered by the lack of documentation. DOCX is a competitor to the fully-documented, open standard OpenDocument Format, also known as ISO/IEC 26300.

DOCX is not to be confused with OOXML, though it often is. While OOXML, also known as ISO/IEC 29500, is technically standardized, it is incompletely documented and only vaguely related to DOCX. The DOCX format itself is neither fully documented nor standard. So the USPTO is also engaged in spreading disinformation by asserting that it is.

Previously:
(2015) Microsoft Threatened the UK Over Open Standards


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by fustakrakich on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:14PM (4 children)

    by fustakrakich (6150) on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:14PM (#1138956) Journal

    Why is this being allowed to happen? I mean, we expect this from the republicans, right?

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    La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:19PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:19PM (#1138961)
    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:32PM

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:32PM (#1138966) Journal

      Well, isn't the goal to maximize your ROI? I mean, politics, it's just business, right?

      --
      La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
  • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:28PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:28PM (#1138965)

    >> I mean, we expect this from the republicans, right?

    The only difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that the Republicans don't hypocritically pretend to be other than what they are.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:49PM (#1139030)

      You mean like pretending to be a small business supporter? Or be against running up huge deficits? Or a supporter and defender of the Constitution? Or a supporter of free trade and open markets?

      Maybe you are right, but only on a technicality. By refusing to lay out a party platform, they established the fact that they do not stand for ANYTHING, except perhaps the belief that goes against the core of what it means to be an American that it is acceptable, nay desirable, to swear fealty to a person over the ideal of democracy (there is actually some pretty old document that gets talked about the beginning of every July that says a thing or two about this topic).