Slashdot Mirror
Palm/3Com Graffiti A Patent Infringement on Xerox
Olmy's Jart writes "According to this article on money.cnn.com, a judge has ruled that graffiti, the one stroke shorthand used on Palm Pilots, infringes a Xerox patent for "unistrokes". Really light on details and no links to betters sites, unfortunately." MSNBC also has the story.
Relevent patent is 5596656
It looks pretty broad and clear
Mmmmmmm
Handspring and all the other PalmOS licensees use the graffiti method, so it could affect them too. My guess is that it will end up meaning extra $ for the OS -- passed along to consumers.
Buy Hex-Rated Stuff, fight the DMCA!
The lawsuit will now move on the the penalty phase. The court will decide if Palm has to pay damages and if it is allowed to continue to use the technology. Xerox will urge the court to either require Palm to stop using Graffiti entirely or pay royalties.
Xerox sued U.S. Robotics, which was later bought by 3Com, back in 1997, claiming that Graffiti infringed a patent Xerox received in 1997. Palm was later spun off from 3Com.
Xerox originally filed for its patent in October of 1993. The first handhelds running the Palm OS, the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000, were released in April of 1996 by U.S. Robotics. These included Graffiti. A question not yet answered is why Jeff Hawkins didn't file for a patent on Graffiti earlier when he had been developing the idea since the 80s.
In June of last year, a judge dismissed the suit on the grounds that Graffiti wasn't similar enough to Unistrokes. In October, the suit was reinstated and moved to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York.
Judge Michael Telesca declared today that Xerox's patent is "valid and enforceable", and that Graffiti does infringe on it.
It is not yet known whether Xerox plans to sue other makers of handheld operating systems, like Microsoft, who also include some form of handwriting recognition.
"Xerox always aggressively defends its patent portfolio -- a valuable corporate asset. Today's ruling vindicates our position that our handwriting-recognition patent was infringed. Either Palm will have to cease production of its hand-held organizer or license the technology from Xerox," said Christina Clayton, Xerox general counsel.
Thanks to montyburns for the tip. -Ed"
Blatanly ripped from Palminfocenter.com
Unistrokes picture - Unistroke.gif
---- "It is never too late to give up our prejudices." --Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862)
Can be found at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/23481.html
Oh, quick question. Does it usually happen that you submit a story, it gets rejected, and then someone else publishes it?
For anyone interested, here is a paper (in Postscript format, on the parc FTP server) from 1993 by David Goldberg and Cate Richardson of PARC discussing unistrokes. It looks like the foundation for the strokes is there. I wonder how Palm's version measures up to their tests.
Is Xerox's claim towards the implementation in the OS or the general input method?
It seems to be more towards the general input method
There is some detail in there about the implementation but it's all based off of the display/input generating a list of xy coordinates making up the stroke. Since I can't imagine any computer engineer using anything but a 2D matrix for their displays it doesn't seem to me that these details narrow the patent down in any realistic manner.
Mmmmmmm
Why can't someone do this to Microsoft?
microsoft have got a big pile of their own patents covering all sorts of things. You would have to be very sure you're not infringing one of them before going after MS.
E.g. how many products don't do something like Method for creating and maintaining user data
Mmmmmmm
Er, it's not the OS that's infringing, it's the interface. It's the quick and easy way of inserting text that doesn't occupy the space of a keyboard or have the hassles of true handwriting recognition which is causing the fuss.
What Xerox patented was an interface concept that remains a highly effective compromise between computer and human. PalmOS, no matter how they change the kernel, will have to license the patent from Xerox or go under.
As for damages, I doubt they'll be hurt too badly. If Xerox has any clue in management, they just want a little piece of Palm's pie.
If a parasite kills the host without first spreading, it kills itself as well. Xerox will almost certainly pursue an Influenza pattern instead of an Ebola pattern.
Regards, Ross
I sense a prior art here: ln -s anyone?
Specifying gestures by example, Dean Rubine, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics , Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Computer graphics July 1991, Volume 25 Issue 4
It is a part of the Andrew Toolkit, historical source is at here.
It is a part of OpenAmulet now.
Perhaps a mouse is NOT a stylus.
Normally, a company goes after the patent infringer that they are most likely to win a case against first. Then, with that decision in their pocket, they come back and start suing all the other infringers. Having won the original patent case, the rest are fairly simple to win as well. Since the other companies also know that, the usual result is a quick settlement out of court for previous infringements and a nice little lucrative royalty fee going forward as well.
I imagine that Xerox will go chase MS and all the other PDA mfr's next (i.e. like the Linux PDA guys as well).
If people are interested I reccomend reading some of the other Microsoft patents. You'd be surprised what they claim in some of them. Others are so specific ("bit-3 of MS-DOS FAT field XYZ in the root directory of the C drive" sort of thing) they appear solely to exist to get their patent numbers up. (Did someone implement patent quotas at MS in the 90s?) In fact a full review of MS patents could keep /. going for quite
some time. It'd really get the blood pressure up too :)
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Unistrokes, a technology that allows users to put information into a computer by printing in a special shorthand, was developed in the early 1990s at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a well-known institution in the technology industry. Xerox obtained the patent for Unistrokes in January of 1997, but currently has no plans to commercialize the technology, according to a company spokesman. ITworld.com 10/9/01
Man and Goat
> Sure, Palm was the original, and the only one ...
Nope. The TRUE original and only one was the Newton (I had a 120 and a 130 back then). Ok, they were quite bulky, especially compared with a Palm, and somewhat slow (at least the 1xx ones, never got to use a 2xxx), but they were great machines and they were the first and original PDAs. I considered Palms as cheap and ugly rip-offs of the Newton back then. Finally I was forced to switch by Apple abandoning the Newton and am now owning two Palms. It would be a shame to have to move on again because of Palm going down, but honestly Palm and PalmOS hasn't improved much over the last 12-18 months. They are hopelessly behind and if they don't get their act together soon, they will vanish. This would be a sad day.
Well as an examiner working for the Eurpoean Patent Office, I can tell you you'd be amazed how often we have to tell applicants their application is pants because of something they cited. The idiots.
Applicants try to get the broadest possible protection every time they apply for a patent - so all it takes is one [lazy, overworked, unskilled, american - pick one] examiner to fail to read properly and crap gets granted!
Not an easy job to do well but a very easy one to screw up in.
hohum
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
However the case may not have been settled on the broad independent claim, it may have been on of the dependent claims such as restricting the alphabet to make the recognition technique possible.
I would not be particularly upset to see the loss of Graphiti. What folk do not seem to realize is that Graphiti is the QWERTY of the handheld. It is deliberately crippling the user interface to reduce it to a level that the technology of the day can cope with.
Incidentaly before manic followers of the cult of Ayn Rand mention it I have read the the Lieberwitz and Margolis 'debunking' of the 'QWERTY myth' and find it to not be credible. Neither the paper nor the book actually make the advertised claim. They actually discredit the evidence that that a rival system was better. The fact that QWERTY was designed crippled is not actually refuted. Nor should anyone be surprised when an ideological faction start yelping that they have 'debunked' facts that discredit their notion of absolute truth, or pay much attention when they do so.
Graphiti is actually designed to allow a puny 20 MHz processor to do handwritting recognition. The principal reason you keep having to lift the stylus off the pad is so that the handwriting recognizer can catch up.
As such the Xerox patent may turn out to be a patent of the type Phill Hallam-Baker proposed filling in a recent IETF meeting. The reasoning goes thus, patents are bad because they effectively stop the use of the ideas they describe in open standards. So in order to make the patent system useful we should stop patenting the good ideas and start patenting really bad ones to discourage their use. This has the secondary advantage that prior art is much less likely to be found.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
For anyone interested, here is a paper [xerox.com] (in Postscript format, on the parc FTP server) from 1993 by David Goldberg and Cate Richardson of PARC discussing unistrokes.
If Xerox published that paper more than one year before the company applied for the patent, then the paper counts as prior art to invalidate the patent.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually there's an alternative method of inputting X - as a backwards K - which is done in one stroke.
Precisely how would your current Visor suddenly become a "paperweight" as a result of this ruling?
They may have to increase prices on new Visors to cover royalties or stop selling them altogether (which would be very sad), but neither of those events will make your pda useless...
It's not like it will suddenly become illegal to use your Visor, or that Xerox will get the right to zap the world with Graffiti-destroying rays that will render your Visor useless... Cheez.
Yeah, except that Psion has announced that they will no longer be developing their PDAs.
Intrigued by your link, I went to their site--and lo and behold, due to weak demand, Psion will continue to sell but will stop development on their PDA line.
If this suit by Xerox succeeds, and Palm either goes out of business or becomes more expensive due to licensing costs, perhaps Psion will re-evaluate their position. But, as it is now, it looks like the Psion PDA is dead.
--
$tar -xvf