Facing Identification Mark (FIM) — format provenance and usability
=====================================================================

This file records the engineering provenance and redistribution boundary for
the Facing Identification Mark (FIM) implemented by Sythos Barcode Universal.

It is an engineering inventory, not legal advice. Patent, copyright and
trademark conclusions still need independent review for the jurisdiction and
the intended product. Items marked [TO VERIFY] remain open questions.


FORMAT AND IMPLEMENTATION BASIS
-------------------------------

FIM is not a general-purpose data carrier: it is one of five fixed,
USPS-defined nine-position bar/no-bar patterns (A, B, C, D, E) printed near
the upper edge of a mailpiece to indicate mail class/handling to automated
facing equipment, as published in USPS Publication 25 ("Designing Letter and
Reply Mail"), chapter 10. Each pattern is a palindrome (reads the same
forward and backward) and always starts and ends with a bar.

This project already implements the height-coded USPS postal family
(POSTNET, PLANET, Intelligent Mail) from the same public USPS documentation
source (see `licenses/postal.license`); FIM is treated at the same trust
bar, not a new or higher one.

The bar presence/absence pattern is represented as original Sythos data
(one module per bar position, no third-party lookup table). The reader
validates a leading and trailing quiet zone before promoting a match. No
third-party source code, lookup table or binary asset is copied into this
repository.

The runtime is original Sythos TypeScript with generated JavaScript output
and is distributed under the MIT License.


PATENT AND TRADEMARK REVIEW
---------------------------

As with the rest of the USPS-published formats already implemented, current
registrations, jurisdiction-specific terms and any USPS branding/trademark
position for "Facing Identification Mark" or "FIM" have not been
independently cleared here. [TO VERIFY] This project makes no unconditional
patent-free, public-domain or trademark-clearance claim.


INDEPENDENT VALIDATION BOUNDARY
--------------------------------

No third-party barcode library was consulted for this format; the five
patterns and their palindrome structure come directly from the cited USPS
publication. An extensive adversarial sweep (random noise, checkerboard
textures, and other implemented symbologies rendered at multiple scales) was
run during implementation to confirm the reader does not produce false
positives — this is an engineering verification step, not a legal opinion.


CONCLUSION
----------

The original Sythos FIM implementation is MIT-licensed. If a rights holder
or user identifies a conflicting notice about the available material,
please open a GitHub issue with the reference so it can be reviewed and
recorded.