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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
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:02PM (5 children)
Then your ability to reason out possible alternatives needs some exercise.
Why transition away from PDF? Because the legacy PDF system is based upon using PDF as a carrier for bitmap scanned images. Most of the PDF's simply contain a scanned image of a sheet of paper. The reason for DOCX is to receive the data prior to converting it to "layout format" so that the actual text content can be extracted and the higher level document structure detected (i.e., what is a header, where paragraphs start/end, etc.). PDF, even when the PDF is textual, is a pure layout format. Internally, a textual pdf is simply a series of instructions to position letters at specific x,y positions on a virtual page. There are no concepts of "this block of text is a paragraph" or "this line is a level 2 heading line". Extracting the text from a PDF is possible (provided the PDF authoring library includes the, sadly, optional table mapping byte values within the PDF to unicode code points) but all the higher level document structure is gone. You simply get letters or words positioned at x,y coordinates on a virtual printed sheet of paper.
Now, you'll naturally want to move the goalposts to, "ok, but why DOCX?". And the answer there is trivially simple. Because the vast majority of the attorneys are already using msword to craft the documents in the first place, so they are just accepting what the lawfirms already use. Convincing lawfirms that the now need to install LibreOffice instead of msword to then write an ODT file would be like trying to pull teeth from chickens.
Is DOCX the best choice, no. But it is the pragmatic choice given that almost all of the law firms are already using msword.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @06:15PM
In correct there is 1 group that needs to correct the error: Microsoft They need to generate compatible files - not the other way around.
DOCX still has many fearyes defined by OLD standards from Word... going back to Word3 (1990). Get the job done right ONCE!!!
F..king Monopoly.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @08:01PM
fuck the lawyers and the dumb ass whores at the USPTO! Extorted public money? Open fucking formats. Stupid pieces of shit!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 27 2021, @02:48AM
"Convincing lawfirms that the now need to install LibreOffice instead of msword to then write an ODT file would be like trying to pull teeth from chickens. "
No need to convince anyone. Msword can save files in ODT format.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 27 2021, @12:29PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 01 2021, @01:50AM
Not RTF. ODT. or, equivalenty, ODF.