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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.
How does this affect handspring? Is Xerox's claim towards the implementation in the OS or the general input method?
-Windchill2001 The One, The Only, The Cold...
Man, Palm is really having a hard time these days. Could this, coupled with their recent downturn help microsoft innovate them out of business a la netscape?
Sure, Palm was the original, and the only one (along with OS licencees) that offers PDAs that aren't overloaded with pricey color screens, 64mb of memory, and desktop applications. (Well they offer those too, but they still have some good straightforward PDAs). But, with the market crowding, and lots of new Wince apps being written, are we seeing the beginning of the end?
I'd hate to have to buy an overloaded PDA because MS becomes the only game in town...
Buy Hex-Rated Stuff, fight the DMCA!
Intellectual Property is being slowly strangled by overrestrective trademarks, copyrights, patents, corrupt companies, and bought politicians.
When are we going to wake up and realize that these artificial constructs originally created to help innovation is actually starting to stifle it? Perhaps people will start to wake up after the recession really starts to hurt. There is going to be a lot of pointing fingers soon.
I don't know what was discussed during the court case, but to me the core of the patent seems to be the method of taking a set of points making up a stroke and (after cleaning up the data) finding the salient features (length and direction of straight lines and curves) and finding the match to the characters in their alphabet.
Read the claims (they're the important bit legally, I believe) - they don't really say anything about the alphabet itself.
Mmmmmmm
Xerox sued palm and won. Xerox did not sue MS. Why is this legal? At this point MS is most likely infringing on a Xerox Patent but Palm is the only organization being punished for it.
Man out justice system is fucked up. If I ran the world Xerox would have to sue everybody who infringed or nobody. It's unfair to let some people off the hook.
War is necrophilia.
...I'm not going to say that unistrokes weren't innovative either.
Well, I will. The problem is that people confuse the word "new" with the word "innovation". I don't think something should get a patent just because it solves a problem which didn't exist before. PDAs weren't possible for a lot of hardware reasons until recently. The input method, while clever, is something that any intelligent person could develop if asked to solve the problem. Put ten engineers in isolation chambers and give them two weeks to try to find efficient ways to input data into a handheld computer and 7 of them will come up with something similar to xerox's patent. Ask ten engineers to triple battery life and they wont do it in years. If one of them does, they'll deserve the patent they get. That's innovation. This isn't.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
If you'd stop the knee-jerk "patents are BAD" reaction and think about the facts before spouting off, you'd realize that this case has been going on since long before the previous ecconomic boom! This isn't about the Tech Slump. Yea, sure -- Xerox is tight for cash, and would love to generate a few $$ off every sale of Palm, Handspring or other devices, but they aren't trying to stiffle competition or put Palm out of business.
Xerox gave us plenty of innovations (e.g., the mouse). This is just one invention they are trying to get credit for.
Your Servant, B. Baggins