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Xerox Patent Ruled Invalid, palmOne Exonerated
An anonymous reader writes "palmOne has issued a press release, that a court has found that the patent that Xerox was using to sue Palm for its character entry method, and was developed in house, didn't infringe because the patent was invalid." The case was first brought against 3Com Corporation back in 1997 before they spun off the Palm brand name.
Error! Your patent is invalid. Press the any key.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I can't stand Graffiti 2... maybe its just because I spent so long using the original Graffiti, but it would make my day if it came back.
I hate fuckin' graffiti 2.
The good news, I guess, is that a dumb patent got invalidated. The bad news is, it took 7 years. How many small companies could keep up a legal battle that long?
The original patent was assigned to a Sumerian scribe. I guess any license fees should go to Iraq.
Was this patent a bad one? I havn't RTFA, but I would think the specific Graffiti method might be somthing that would be good to patent...
I hated Graffiti 2... long live the original graffiti. Actually, I never stopped using Graffiti because I never upgraded my PalmOS beyond 4.1
palmOne Wins Summary Judgment Invalidating Xerox's Unistroke Patent
/PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- palmOne, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLMO) announced that summary judgment had been issued in its favor dismissing Xerox Corporation's claim that palmOne's former text-entry system, Graffiti(R), infringed a Xerox patent. In a decision released today, Judge Michael A. Telesca of the United States District Court for the Western District of New York held that the Xerox patent was invalid.
.
MILPITAS, Calif., May 21
The summary judgment ruling will result in the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Xerox in 1997 against Palm, Inc. and its former parent, 3Com Corp. Palm, Inc. has since spun off PalmSource, Inc., maker of the Palm OS(R) platform, and acquired Handspring, Inc. to form palmOne, Inc. palmOne had retained liability for the Xerox matter.
"We firmly believed that the broad interpretation of the patent, as it evolved in this case, would render the patent invalid," said Mary Doyle, senior vice president and general counsel for palmOne. "We are very pleased that this court has agreed."
"This is a terrific outcome," said Todd Bradley, palmOne president and chief executive officer. "We've persevered for years to achieve this result and the vindication palmOne deserves."
The Xerox patent in question is U.S. Patent No. 5,596,656, which covered unistroke symbols. The court held that the patent was invalid because, "The prior art references anticipate and render obvious the claim," or that the unistroke system was not a unique invention.
About palmOne, Inc.
palmOne, Inc. delivers what matters most to customers -- whether a single consumer or company of thousands -- enabling users to improve their personal lives and professional productivity through mobile devices and solutions.
palmOne is the name adopted in October 2003 by Palm, Inc., when it spun off PalmSource, Inc., maker of the Palm OS(R) platform software, and acquired Handspring, Inc. Uniting the Zire(TM), Tungsten(TM) and Treo(TM) subbrands, the creation of palmOne launched a new, stronger market leader in handheld computer and communications hardware and software solutions.
More information about palmOne, Inc. is available at http://www.palmOne.com
NOTE: palmOne, Zire, Tungsten, Treo and Palm OS are among the trademarks or registered trademarks owned by or licensed to palmOne, Inc. or its subsidiaries. All other brand and product names are or may be trademarks of, and are used to identify products or services of, their respective owners.
SOURCE palmOne, Inc.
Man, some of these lawsuits get handed down through the generations (computer time). I bet 3Com/Palm/palmOne is glad to see the end of this. In each year's company report, they had to keeping listing it in the Oh Yeah, We're Being Sued section.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Internetnews has this take on the story.
! st1l. hann/t gof us3d to grattit! Z yet,
Now what is Palm doing to do about Graffiti?
They had previously let go of Graffiti and developed their own Graffitti2. and made everyone learn new keystrokes. If they go back now, everyone who learned Graffiti2 is not going to be happy However, I'd be willing to bet that not everyone has upgraded, and many, if not most, are still using Graffiti1. Maybe they will include both, and have the user decide?
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
It seem to me more and more patents are being ruled as invalid, If this is indeed the case why are they being assigned in the first place ?
When Edison patented many of his inventions they were as new and as alien as anything could be. Patent examination on these must have been pretty easy, even considering the entire process was manual.
I wonder how many patents would stand up to a further examination.
This deluge of bogus patents would seem to me to effect even the valid ones. If I tommorow came up with say a TRUE Anti-Gravity machine it would seem that everyone and their brother would try to get it invalidated for their own use. And I'm sore some people have patented Anti-Gravity machine that dont actually work, would these invalidate a patent that did actually work ?
I dont belive patents are bad, quite to the contrary I belive them neccesary, I think its their enforcment and their use in bullying that is wrong. If I come up with a whole new concept I would sure as hell want it protected. But as I said before the deluge of bogus patents would seem to put the whole process in question
The summary judgment ruling will result in the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Xerox in 1997 against Palm, Inc.
1997?! Thats 7 damn years ago. Please God, don't let this SCO thing go on that long. Finish them off with a bolt of lightning right now.
Is there a fix for devices like the Clie to return it to using the original Graffiti pen strokes?
Graffiti2 is bloody awful - especially the letter 'i' which requires 2 strokes instead of one and is misinterpreted over half the time as another letter.
Grafitti 2 is based on Jot. If the license is fully paid up, I don't see Palm going back to the original Grafitti.
Do I hear an open-source movement in the making? Art and math geeks devising a new free-as-in-beer method of defining strokes -> letters/numbers/symbols, then creating a tiny footprint massively portable OS for palm devices that can be flashed in over the existing palm OS?
Sounds like a plan to me.
[SQL Error ID 10-T: This sig. is above your current threshold.]
Don't know how to make my link work.
Here is the meat of the graffiti switch article from Palminfocenter if you want to use graffiti 1 instead of graffiti 2:
Step 1
Use a handheld that has the original Graffiti system installed , Use a handheld file manager, such as FileZ, to locate the following files (You will need to check the ROM box, as the files are stored in the device ROM):
Graffiti Library.prc, size: 30k, creator: grft
Graffiti Library_enUS.prc, size 22k, creator: grft
Step 2
Beam or copy the above 2 files to the target handheld you want to install original Graffiti on.
Step 3
Preform a soft reset (simply press the devices reset pin), and you're set to start enjoying original Graffiti again.
PIC tested this procedure with a Tungsten T and were able to successfully install Graffiti over Graffiti 2 on a Tungsten T2, Zire 71, Tungsten C and a Sony Clie NX80V. Other models that run Palm OS 5 should also be compatible. Even after the replacement the write anywhere on screen feature of Palm OS 5.2 still function as normal, even on the Tungsten C. The on-screen Graffiti reference also reverts back to the original guide.
http://nyamenation.org/
It won't cost you anything to try again. Visit linuxiso.org
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Okay I posted a new journal. :-)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It seems that a lot of really nifty things (the mouse, the desktop, and apparently Graffiti) were developed at Xerox, and never produced. Then someone else says "wow, that's stunning" and makes millions off of it. Its not like Xerox lacks the resources to go after these things, more like the ambition. It seems like a perfect case of "we want a monopoly on this, not because we have any intention of even trying to produce it" patents, as opposed to the "I've got this cool idea, but my lottery investment strategy has yet to pay off, would someone like to license it" patents.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
If anybody wants to try out Xerox's Unistroke alphabet, a simple text editor that's trained to recognize Unistrokes is part of the demos that come with Garnet (source comes under a public domain license). Personally, I'm not too impressed, but then again, I find the whole notion of pen computing more of an annoying throwback to the 60s than anything else.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
Does this mean it would now also be possible to develop an Open Source version of graffiti and use it on Linux-based palmtops for free?
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
...here is how bad Graffiti 2 is. Why you write 't' the first stroke is an 'i'. When you make the horizontal stroke it sends a 'backspace' followed by a 't' to correct the incorrect 'i'. You can imagine how many applications are messed up by this. But it's worse: 'i' followed by a space (a horizontal stroke) is a 't'. So you have to wait between the 'i' and 'space' to make sure it doesn't come out as 't'. Please, please, pretty please, Palm bring back Graffiti 1. Graffiti 2 is like phoning people by rolling dice and pressing a button every time a digit you want comes up.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
My PDA says it's time to Eat Up Martha !
But that doesn't show that patent incentive caused or even contributed to the invention of the transistor.
Evidence of patent incentive contributing to the invention of the transistor might be memos from Bell Labs executives saying that they would kill the project were it not for the potential of patent royalties. (I'm not saying that that is the only form of evidence that you could find. I just want to provide an example.)
Although I have not tracked the claims down, I've heard it said that Bell Labs's funding was largely the result of the phone company's profit being legally limited. So, if the phone company thought they were going to make too much money in a given quarter, they'd dump it into Bell Labs, which worked on things that were of potential benefit to the phone company, rather than things that were useless to the phone company but could provide substantial patent royalty revenue.
Even if you show that the patent incentive caused or substantially contributed to the invention of the transistor, that still does not show that patents were worthwhile in this case. To do that, you have to estimate when someone else would have invented the transistor in the absence of patent incentives or with reduced patent incentives and show that the net benefit to society was probably greater with patent incentives of that magnitude.
To go from the question of whether patents were worthwhile in this positive example to the question of what the patent law should be, you have then measure the benefits in the positive cases (if you do show that they are examples of net benefit) against the costs of the negative cases (things that are patented that would have been invented anyway, patenting of non-inventions, litigation costs, etc.).
Obviously, this is a big empirical question. When I try to do the "math", I generally find that there are almost no examples of inventions where the patent incentive appears to have brought the invention about substantially faster or better than I think would have occurred without patents, and I see lots of examples of costly negative effects of patents.
Given that patnets are a deprivation of liberty, I think the benefit of the doubt should be made in favor of having less patent restriction. Adding that factor in, my belief at this time is that patents don't seem to be worth it for the public, in practice.
I'm hoping that the new PalmOne will release a software update to put the original Graffiti back on all the palms that don't have it. Perhaps future Palms can have a choice at first boot, Graffiti 1 or 2.
The real question, is are they going to sue Xerox for all the lost sales when they couldn't offer Graffiti 1?
A latent existence
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
Drug companies was a bad example since they mostly spend their money on antibaldness and wood enhanching. Most serious developing occur on universitys and institutions. The drug companies dont spend much money on basic research, theres no profit there.
HTTP/1.1 400
I think that you want to do this: go to palminfocenter.com
You use the a href tag: [a href="http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_stor y.asp?ID=5830"]blah blah [/]
where you swap the [] for the less than and greater than signs. hth
PalmOS() // erm, I dunno - I was hoping someone else // would write it
{
[ CODE GOES HERE ]
}
To make the link work, take the space out of story. Slashcode puts it there so that people can't widen the page.
The recognition part is not the "core" of the patetnt, the core is a specialized alphabet that 1. allows faster text entry and 2. easy to recognize since it's "unistroke" e.g. one single stroke per character. However the patent is riddiculously general, the recognition part IS 1. obvious and 2. known in the science since the 60s, it's really not novel. And specialized simplified alphabets like Unistrokes have been known since the 17th century in various shorthand alphabets in UK and Germany. So in summary, it's excellent that the patent is invalidated.
If you turn on "autocomplete", it doesn't interoperate well with grafitti 2 when entering characters that require two strokes. I noticed this bug right away when I puchased my T2. Palm support knows about the problem but has no solution other than the "unsupported" one of installing the grafitti 1 libraries from a T1. That's what I did and I've been happy ever since.
Maybe now Palm will include both entry methods and give the user a choice of which one they want to use.
The Unistroke patent was filed as a continuation of an application from 1993 and thus inherited the earlier filing date.
The party's not necessarily over yet.
....... just in case you thought 7 years to summary judgment is slow ..... :-(
A summary judgment could get overturned on appeal, the case could be remanded back for trial, then trial judgment or verdict could be questioned on appeal, there could be more remands and appeals after that
Whether any of this happens depends on how the patentee and its lawyers view the reasons given for summary judgment, and either carry on or drop it.
-wb-
This algorithm is neither dumb nor obvious.
The "dumb" part is that such an obvious algorithm with prior art was granted a patent.
Palm copied PARC's Graffiti alphabet because the algorithm was so elegant.
Er, no.
Graffiti was invented by Palm. Xerox was developing Unistrokes around the same time, and giving lectures about it, and generally not keeping it a secret.
The patent is not specifically about Graffiti. Xerox basically patented the whole idea of a handwriting recognition alphabet where each letter is a single stroke. And that idea is obvious.
How can I claim it's obvious? Well, think about it. What's the #1 problem in character recognition on a PDA? Figuring out which stroke is part of which letter. Did the user want to write a 't', or did he want to write an 'i' followed by a '-'? Gee, life is so much simpler with the letters like 'c', 'z', 'o', etc., where there is just one stroke. Hang on... what if all letters were just one stroke? Then we don't need to figure out which stroke is part of which letter!
Entirely because of the Xerox lawsuit, Palm rolled out Graffiti 2. It's major difference from Graffiti is... not every letter is one stroke. Some are two strokes. It's dumb that they had to do that; there is zero benefit to the consumer here.
According to the PalmOne press release, the appeals judge ruled that a) this idea is obvious, b) there was prior art, so therefore c) the patent is not valid and PalmOne doesn't have to pay Xerox.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
My doctor is wined and dined regularly by drug companies pedaling their monopolies. Why would that occur if they really had something new and worthwhile that sold itself.
I know of numerous cases of carefully scientifically verified alternative treatments that are not sold by drug companies because they are publicly known and cannot be monopolised, and when an existing drug monopoly goes out of patent, they make patentable modifications without improving the drug at all so they can put their marketing muscle behind another monopoly.
While the research benefits the companies, any help it provides for consumers is grossly overstated and underperforming because the emphasis is on monopoly, just like Microsoft.
So then we get lots more government regulation to control the spiraling costs of health care and make sure people don't buy drugs from Canada, etc.
Lobby your representative before May 27th to prevent the worst!
Say no to software patents.
You are wrong on several counts.
My understanding of the algorithm is that Xerox devides the Graffiti area into 9 ``blocks.'' The recognition algorithm tracks which block the stylus starts in, the end block, and the blocks through which the stylus travels. The recognition is fast and accurate, because each letter is simply an encoding of (start, end, intermediate blocks).
That recognition algorithm (and numerous variants of it) goes back to the 1960's and has been described in standard textbooks and papers (one example is the Ledeen recognizer, discussed here).
It is also not what Xerox patented. The Xerox patent is not about the recognition algorithm, it is about having the writer indicate when one character ends and another one starts; one instance of that approach is to use a single stroke for each character.
In fact, many recognizers using this old algorithm happened to also be unistroke recognizers--it's an obvious idea--which is probably why the unistroke patent got thrown out, and that's a good thing.
Palm copied PARC's Graffiti alphabet because the algorithm was so elegant.
If only they had, but unfortunately, Palm did not copy PARC's Unistroke alphabet. Unistroke is a much more effective alphabet than Graffiti 1 or Graffiti 2 and not significantly harder to learn.
Keep in mind that Xerox had a Palm-like device several years before Palm, complete with networking. Furthermore, the original Palm technical staff apparently knew the PARCTab work quite well. With their patent, Xerox was effectively trying to protect some of their pioneering work in this area, but they failed. That's not necessarily bad, since bad patents may be overall worse than no patents at all.
But keep the history of this in mind: Palm invented very little of what they are shipping. And, to this day, judging by their nearly non-existent publication record, Palm seems to be doing little or no research. Places like Xerox PARC are in trouble, while Palm has more than half of the handheld market. If companies like Palm keep building businesses on other people's ideas but don't invest in research, who is left to pay for the research?
I hope like smeg that this means Palm will put Graffiti1 back in any future PalmOS'!
:P
Graffiti2 was the suckiest piece of crap I've ever been forced to use. There was one character that needed like, 4 bloody strokes to write!
I just gave up and used Decuma until I figured out how to get the G1 libraries out of my old PDA.
I kinda wish Decuma could recognose joined-up handwriting 'tho - I'd dump Graffiti in a second then
terminal emulators.
It's real #(%*# annoying. There are also a couple of games (including one frotz implementation) that breaks as well.
About 4-5 years ago I messed around with Red Hat 6.1 (I believe...forget
which version exactly).
4-5 years ago is prehistoric. Why don't you run Windows 95 or Windows 98 First Edition instead of XP?
I want to run some 5 year old version of Linux about as much as you'd want to run some 5 year old version of Windows.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Graffiti 2 was difficult to learn and it does have some quirks- but it still works. I like the original graffiti too, but why is everyone complaining about Graffiti 2 when you can now choose between both.
Please quit complaining, adapt- its still one of the things that we do best
Palm absolutely did not use the Unistroke alphabet. Unistroke maximized the character separability in the Unistroke feature space, which led to a set of unusual and non-intuitive strokes. Palm instead choose a set of characters that balanced class seperability with similarity to natural english characters -- this was significantly different than the Xerox approach.
The whole problem (and the reason for the invalidation) is that the Xerox patent was reapplied to ANY single stroke character set used in a computer context, in an input box. What Xerox ended up owning was the entire concept of a gesture based alphabet. It is VERY VERY good that this patent was invalidated after it's inappropriate application.
The patent is not dumb, in it's specified context. The application of the patent outside of it's appropriate context was dumb.
In regards to your specific assertion, you must know that the two technical approaches you list -- (1) the gesture, or path as a function of time, and (2) multi-resolution analysis, as well as their use together, far predate the Xerox claim. *I*, for instance (the great I) was using this approach for gesture analysis in 1986. The specific use of the resolution factor (3 x 3) is hardly patentable. What was patentable were the specific feature set and character set involved, which were not assumed by Palm.
All that stuff was swiped by Xerox from Stanford and the University of Utah. See:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~amulet/papers/uihistor
The Mouse: The mouse was developed at Stanford Research Laboratory (now SRI) in 1965 as part of the NLS project (funding from ARPA, NASA, and Rome ADC) [9] to be a cheap replacement for light-pens, which had been used at least since 1954 [10, p. 68]. Many of the current uses of the mouse were demonstrated by Doug Engelbart as part of NLS in a movie created in 1968 [8]. The mouse was then made famous as a practical input device by Xerox PARC in the 1970's
Windows: Multiple tiled windows were demonstrated in Engelbart's NLS in 1968 [8]. Early research at Stanford on systems like COPILOT (1974) [46] and at MIT with the EMACS text editor (1974) [43] also demonstrated tiled windows. Alan Kay proposed the idea of overlapping windows in his 1969 University of Utah PhD thesis [15] and they first appeared in 1974 in his Smalltalk system [11] at Xerox PARC, and soon after in the InterLisp system [47].
See. We (the US Public) paid for the development of the mouse at Stanford, through the publicly owned NLS project. Kay came up with overlapped windows at the University of Utah, while a student and way before software patents.
Things are NEVER the way you think they are. Actually no one specific ever "invents" anything, we actually all just stumble on stuff together. Then someone specific gets credit for it. People are stupid, and love fame more than anything. Then we die.
My favourite part of this whole thing is that the prior art that invalidated this patent is over 2000 years old.
It was invented by Tiro, who was a slave of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-65 BC).
Checkout The History of Shorthand
- An address entry with a company name starting with "L" - for extra fun, make it long enough to occupy more than one line
- An address entry with a company name starting with "T" (optional?)
- An address entry with a company name starting with "I" (optional?)
- Perform the Graffiti 2 entry (downstroke followed by cross-stroke) in a new address entry in (obviously) the Company field.
I just now tried it and it happens for me too; Contacts 1.0.1 on OS 5.2.1. I'll bet you'll have an epiphany if you bother to try it again; even though this is a relatively oldish story, I hope you'll post results.As a sidenote, I have abandoned Graffiti almost entirely (except for menu stroke via Graffiti-anywhere on T3) and instead use MessagEaseST regularly.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
How do you write your 'i'? This problem isn't just something I'm having, it's documented in Palm's own documents.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.