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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.
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.
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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.
Internetnews has this take on the story.
Yes there is a way. You have to get the Graffiti1 files from a Palm OS 5 device such as the Palm Tungsten T.
This article explains how.
The letter i in Graffiti2 is really anoying, also k and t are a pain. Making x a two stroke character is acceptable only because it occurs so infrequently in English.
You can probably put Graffiti 1 on your Graffiti 2 Palm device. See this link for one method:
http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_stor y.asp?ID=5830
http://nyamenation.org/
i have upgraded from a IIIc to a t3 and i hated it. Tealscrip (shareware) dose a pretty go job hacking it back till Palmsource cooks up a new firmware (perhaps when 6.0 comes out :) )
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/
Ah yes, Marconi, the guy who didn't invent the radio. His patent has failed to win against Nickola Teslas prior art 3 times in the courts. (It hasn't won against Tesla once that I know of.)
Seems that Teslas paper on wireless telography was published in Italy (and in Italian) 3 years prior to Marconi's device. (It was published in several European countries in native languages.)
Tesla even demonstrated the application of wireless telography at a worlds fair by using it to make a light go on/off. Though he didn't try morse code with it, or if he did, none of the fairgoers watching it noted it as such. (They probably couldn't read morse code if you hit them upside the head with a morse signal manual.)
Patents have been a screwy thing since a week after they started, maybe before. The only real difference is the level of stupidity of the new patent laws and examiners.... (I still think it's total BS that companies can patent something everyone knows they didn't create, and we have prior art going back thousands of years at least. Aka, Human DNA.) (Oh well, it's not as bad as US Copyright laws have gotten in a number of ways. yet...)
...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.
I used TealScript to create a profile that allows me to write using the Xerox unistroke alphabet. After years of use, I have become more proficient. It is indeed faster than Grafitti and much less error prone, because each character is very easily distinguishable from all other characters.
I personally find the FITALY keyboard (www.fitaly.com) to be far faster than any handwriting recognition (5x-10x). I do have accuracy problems, but even taking the time for error correction into account, I would estimate I am 3 times faster with FITALY than with unistroke character recognition.
There's obviously something I don't know about how to create a hyperlink in a slashdot post, since all of the above three links are pointing to slashdot somehow. Sorry about that. The displayed text of the URLs is correct. I used the A HREF tag to create them. I did not find any info in the FAQ on how to do this.
Unless Palm have their own patents on it, I guess so.
The Xerox patent was on "unistrokes", a system that was _very_ similar to Graffiti, but is a little simpler to implement, faster to use, and harder to learn.
Unistroke uses only three types of stroke, a straight line, a curve through 90 degrees and a curve that crosses back over itself, which makes the recognition much easier than graffiti. The system was designed to be quick to use: common sequences of letters alternate in direction, so that you have to reposition your pen less frequently. The drawback is that these two factors mean that a lot of the strokes are non-obvious, bearing little or no relationship to the letter they encode.
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.
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?