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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)
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
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
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.
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.
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