Xerox Wins Prelim Patent Ruling Against 3Com

Snibor Eoj writes "According to an article on Yahoo! News, Xerox has won a ruling that will allow it to pursue a claim against 3Com over a patent violation. They claim that the Graffiti language used in the Palm division violates the patent for a handwriting recognition method called "unistrokes" developed at Xerox PARC. "

Comments

Xerox Credit

[Accipiter]

You know, Xerox gets credit for very little that they have done. When you mention "Xerox", most people think of photocopiers. (Forget that they pioneered that industry, and because of that, most any photocopier is referred to a Xerox machine, as a photocopy is called a Xerox copy.)

Few people realize that they DID make computers at one time, and actually tried to enter the consumer market. Pirates of Silicon Valley made it well known that Xerox Parc pressed the concept of the GUI, and Apple just simply lifted and expanded on the idea, but before that it was simply "Apple invented the GUI."

So now, Xerox develops their handwriting recognition technology (unistrokes), and Palm develops off of that, and yet again Xerox is left out in the cold. I can certainly understand why they're upset. How would YOU feel if you made some revolutionary developments, patented them, and had someone "borrow" your technology without giving you credit?

I think it's high time Xerox got some credit for the research they conduct. They certainly deserve it. Without their technology, we could have quite possibly ended up without such luxuries as a decent graphical interface, or even photocopies until much much farther down the road.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Patent Pending

[Imortus]

In haiku:

It's about time that
Xerox gets paid for their work
See, they will settle

Surely they ask not
much considering that they
designed the language

Information wants
to be free; but people want
their cake, eat it too.

Xerox unistroke device

[jetson123]

Xerox made a handheld device, called the PARC TAB, roughly the size of the PalmPilot several years before the PalmPilot came out. That's what the patent grew out of.

The PARC TAB let you perform many of the functions of the PalmPilot. For quick access, it had a bunch of buttons, and for text entry, you'd use a unistroke alphabet (more efficient than the PalmPilot's alphabet). It was also networked through IR links (networked links were, and still are, installed in the ceilings around Xerox PARC).

Diagram of Unistroke Characters

[cradle]

Here's an image of the Unistroke character set.

-David

Re:Diagram of Unistroke Characters

[Cy Guy]

I agree. here is a diagram that compares the two character sets from a paper comparing the two.

Obviously, the goal of Graffiti was to develop a system that was learnable. It appears to me based on the simplicity of the vowels, that the primary goal of Unistrokes was to limit total pen strokes. One way Unistrokes achieves this is by relying on the vector of the stroke so the writing can ONLY be read by the input device since the characters for M & N, U & V, C & D, E & T, A & I and K & Y, are identicle pairs if the system is used on paper. Another argument, is that there is no penstroke in any Graffiti character that is the same as a pen stroke from the corresponding Unistroke character, that isn't already part of the letter it represents.

The fact that Graffiti is a "unistroke" system (ie you make contact with the writing surface just once for each character) can't in itself make it a patent infringement, otherwise the Unistrokes patent would be invalid based on cursive handwriting being prior art.

If Xerox wants to make a case, it should go after the use of pen-input (to call Unistrokes handwriting is too much of a stretch) for PDA's which they might be able to establish based on their development of the PARCtab starting in 1992.

(Full Disclosure Notice, I own a small ammount of 3COM stock)

unistrokes != grafiti

[foolishj]

To me it appears that the unistrokes alphabet is designed for speed of entry while the grafiti alphabet is designed for rapid learning. There is an obvious correlation between grafiti strokes and the letters they represent, whereas unistrokes are pretty much random.

See for yourself:
Grafiti strokes
Unistrokes

And if they've just patented a way of entering characters via strokes, well, that's pretty obvious when it's your only method of input. Not that obviousness seems to matter to patents anymore.

A Brief History of Grafitti

[GeorgeH]

3Com doesn't claim to have invented graffiti. The history of graffiti is a little more sorid.

Remember the old 1990's Doonsbury cartoons that made fun of the Apple Newton's handwriting recognition? Well they were pretty true. So Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinski, along with the rest of their software firm wrote a program called Graffiti. The magic of this program was that instead of trying to interpret normal handwriting, Graffiti 'forced' you to write a certain way, and handwriting recognition went way up, but not enough to save the Newton from terminal failure.

But Jeff and Donna still believed in the PDA, so Jeff decided that a PDA should fit in the shirt pocket, and they went from there. Hence Palm Computing, the Palm Pilot, and the whole hullabaloo that is the current PalmOS scene.

For those interested, the patent is at http://www.patents.ibm.com/detai ls?pn=US05596656__.

My 10 second analysis is that they are fairly similar, but Xerox filed this in October 1995 and I'm pretty sure Grafitti for the Newton was out in 93, but I'm nowhere near certain, so take this with a grain of salt.
--

Don't get your history from the movies

[Antaeus Feldspar]

Few people realize that [Xerox-PARC] DID make computers at one time, and actually tried to enter the consumer market. Pirates of Silicon Valley made it well known that Xerox Parc pressed the concept of the GUI, and Apple just simply lifted and expanded on the idea, but before that it was simply "Apple invented the GUI."

However, Pirates of Silicon Valley was a movie. Movies are notorious for twisting historical facts to make a better story, and in this case they decided to take a myth (which they might have even believed themselves) and play it up for the drama. So, Pirates didn't make the "theft of the GUI" myth 'well-known', since you can't 'know' something that isn't true. They just dramatized the accusation quite well.

Who says it's a myth? Bruce Horn says so. Jef Raskin says so. These are the people who were there, at PARC and at Apple, and who know what PARC did (and did not) come up with -- but two decades later, people are claiming, "Well, I saw the TV movie, so I know better what the real history is."

Bottom line: Some of the concepts that mythology claims Apple 'stole' from Xerox PARC actually predate the existence of PARC. Other concepts that mythology claims Apple 'stole' from PARC were clearly invented at Apple.

And yes, there were some concepts (not as many as people think) that were originally implemented at Xerox PARC, which were later re-implemented in the Macintosh interface. However:

• If you believe that a concept is property, and that anyone who sees a good concept and re-implements it elsewhere with improvements in order to make a better system is scum, what are you doing reading Slashdot?
• If Xerox PARC believed that concepts were property and that anyone who saw their concepts demonstrated could 'steal' them, why on Earth did they regularly arrange demonstrations for visitors, including the heads of other computer companies?

I hate to say it. But it seems that the opportunity to see Apple as "the bad guy" is overwhelming many people's ability to think critically, or even to remember their own beliefs about whether software concepts should be patentable.

How do we rate the justification of a patent?

[bons]

As I see the debate rage across the postings it occurrs to me that the methods people use to decide if a patent is worthy or not may not be worthy in themselves. Let us use for our examples H.G. Well's Time Machine and Xerox's unistrokes.

Is the concept obvious?
Although this seems like a good way to judge patents, it really doesn't work well. In retrospect, almost everything seems obvious. The advantages to having a time machine are obvious to anyone, but we would all agree that someone who invented a time machine should deserve a patent. (At least I hope we would.)

Is it easy to use?
A lot of people seem to be judging XEROX on this basis. They claim that since the characters are simple, the patent should be denied. I believe that using a time machine would also be simple, but that's no reason to deny a patent for a time machine. Ease of use is a good thing and should be encouraged.

Is the device easy to create?
Now this is an interesting one. How easy is it to actually create a workable handwriting recognition system. Actually, that's not that easy. I'm sure some of us could do it, especially since we're only trying to duplicate an existing system, not create a new system (we know it can work, which helps a lot). For technological patents, I'm willing to state that an item sufficently technically difficult to prototype should deserve a patent.

Is it obvious? On this question I need to break the field into two halves. In a younger, technology based field, almost everything is obvious. It's very hard not to come up with an obvious new way to use that technology. If Slashdot hadn't come along, a similar method of moderation would have been developed by someone else (it may have for all I know). In addition, almost everything is obvious in retrospect.
On the other hand, certain fields are no longer technological. In these fields, almost any new invention get's away with the answer "If it was obvious, why hasn't anyone thought it up before." When I was a machinist, we create a couple of patentable tools, simply based off the fact that these tools were extremly useful and did not exist. These tools could have been made with the equipment available before WWII but were not. Therefore, they should be declared to be non-obvious.
It seems to me that the best way to rate this is to examine how long the technology has existed that makes the creation of the device possible.

Summation
I would suggest that the best way to rate patents is: "The difficulty of creating the prototype multiplied by the amount of time the technology has existed to create that prototype.". When a patent is challenged by another company we should also consider the amount of time the patent has been held before being challenged. If that is a long period of time, then it indicates that that patent deserves to stand as the item was either a lot more difficult to prototype or a lot more non-obvious than we thought.

Responses and feedback appreciated.

I worked with Jeff Hawkins, founder of Palm

[AaronW]

I worked with Jeff Hawkins back when he worked at GRiD Systems and developed his handwriting recognition system. He tried to sell GRiD on the Graffiti recognition since trying to recognize standard handwriting (even for a human) is *much* more difficult.

GRiD didn't want to do that so Jeff took off and founded Palm Computing, which was later bought out by 3COM.

Jeff developed the algorithms for handwriting recognition while in school during the late 80's and early 90's and his method was quite different that the methods used by everyone else. For one thing, his recognition algorithm would work well on an 8088 while everyone else needed at least a fast 386 or 486.

The main problem with trying to recognizing standard characters is that it is nearly impossible to recognize what is written without extensive context work. For example, an O (Oh) and a D can be nearly impossible to differentiate between depending on how the person writes. It's even more difficult to differentiate between, say, a 0 (zero) and an O (Oh).

GRiD worked by writing entry forms which limited the types of characters that could be entered. I.e. numeric fields looked for the closest numeric match and text fields looked for the appropriate text match (i.e. only one case). GRiD knew of the limitations of handwriting recognition, but their management was blind to the vast improvement graffiti made. I havn't read info on Xerox, but I know Jeff developed graffiti probably around '91-92, possibly earlier.

I worked on a palm computer with handwriting recognition back in '93, the Casio Zoomer. The thing took PCMCIA flash cards, ran MSDOS, had IR and serial links, and could take a PCMCIA option card. It even had digital audio so it would say 'You've got mail' when using it to connect to AOL. Oh, and the thing ran Geoworks with Jeff's handwriting recognition.

It never took off for several reasons. First of all, the handwriting recognition was not graffiti and thus had a high error rate. Second of all, it was a little too big to fit into a shirt pocket. It did have some cool features, though. Geoworks was pretty cool, but not as simple as PalmOS.

It had everything. It could tie into AOL Email, it had Pocket Quicken. It had Solitair (the most important Windoze application). It even had a program for caluclating what everyone owed at a restaraunt (including tip).