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Xerox Patent Ruled Invalid, palmOne Exonerated

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the not-so-inventive-after-all dept.

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.

20 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Good news / bad news by jbellis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Good news / bad news by jsebrech · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ofcourse, palm was bought out during the litigation, so you could argue they didn't survive the legal battle.

      The only ones who can survive patent lawsuits are the truly gigantic corporate behemoths like microsoft and ibm. They have the patent portfolio to ensure that they can crosslicense their way out of most of the litigation, and the deep pockets to drag out the court case long enough that the other side gives up, regardless of the merits.

    2. Re:Good news / bad news by MartinG · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This algorithm is neither dumb nor obvious

      It's not "dumb" maybe.

      But obvious? The trouble is that to one not skilled in the art, everything seems non obvious.

      A good test for obviousness is:

      Can you think of a more obvious method?

      --
      -- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz .@adgimnoprstu
    3. Re:Good news / bad news by LnxAddct · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That algorithm is fairly obvious. Similar algorithms are used all the time in computer science. I even wrote one about 3 years ago, without ever being told anything about such algorithms. If you think about the problem at hand, the solution makes sense. I could have easily made a commercial product using something similar with no knowledge of Xerox's patent. Now if Xerox's source code was stolen and copied, that would be one issue, but simply using an idea and then making it yourself with your own source code, there should be nothing wrong with that. I didn't RTFA but the my understanding is that they didn't steal the source code. Ideas shouldn't be patentable.
      Regards,
      Steve

    4. Re:Good news / bad news by Dun+Malg · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I'm sorry, what's dumb about this patent?

      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).

      This algorithm is neither dumb nor obvious.

      It's obvious, e.g. the graffiti area can discern the position of the stylus with a resolution of, say, 45 along the vertical axis and 90 horizontally. Now, trying to come up with a quick, low processing requirement method of mapping characters leads directly to the question of "how fine a resolution do we need to track?" This then leads to the answer, "if we come up with our own simple alphabet, we can cut it down to as low as a three by three grid". It may not be obvious to YOU, but anyone trying to solve the problem of handwriting recognition would think of it based on the first rule of solving ANY problem: SIMPLIFY.

      The reason graffiti2 sucks so badly is that they were forced to use a decoding method that was neither simple nor elegant, as Xerox claimed a patent on the obvious solution to the problem.

      --
      If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
  2. Good! by erroneus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I hated Graffiti 2... long live the original graffiti. Actually, I never stopped using Graffiti because I never upgraded my PalmOS beyond 4.1

  3. Invalid Invalid Invalid by MajorDick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Invalid Invalid Invalid by RickHunter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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 ?

      Its simple. The guidelines the patent office works with say that they are to assume a patent is valid unless clear evidence to the contrary is presented. If its invalid, the courts will sort it out. This maximizes their revenue, which is based on patents approved.

      Juries in patent cases, OTOH, are (or possibly were) given guidelines telling them to, if there was any doubt, assume that the patent was valid. As if it was invalid, the patent office wouldn't have granted it, right? This is why the vast majority of bogus patent challenges go to the patent-holder in the first round and the inventor (*) on appeal.

      (*) - Inventor as the person who actually designed and built the device is almost never the patent-holder these days.

    2. Re:Invalid Invalid Invalid by sjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'll bet that if the USPTO was made liable for the legal costs of successfully invalidating a patent, they'd be a LOT more careful about granting bad patents.

  4. Re:Graffiti by magsilva · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They could offer both options, Graffiti and Graffiti2, so you could select the one that best fit you. I'd love that, Graffiti works much better for me.

  5. Re:Graffiti by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    If they're smart, they'd piss off that small group of people who like Grafitti 2 and go back to G1. I always hear the same thing: G2 is easier to learn for people who've never used a PDA, but G1 only takes a little longer and is much faster and more accurate for the rest of the life of your device.

    I will not buy another G2 Palm. Right now, there are viable options (such as TealScript) to give owners of newer units G1 capability, but as with any closed source application and OS combination, it will only continue to work for as long as it's updated to work with new systems. As soon a TealPoint gets tired of supporting it, the product dies, and I lose the possibility of updating to newer hardware and actually being able to use it.

    I've tried and tried to get used to G2, but I just can't. If Palm re-adopts G1, I will continue to buy their devices. If they don't, I'll go back to using a DayRunner (which accepts any handwriting style and has a place to put my checkbook).

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  6. OS Call To Arms by LaBlueCow · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.]
    1. Re:OS Call To Arms by sunya · · Score: 2, Insightful

      but as we all know, free beer leads to free speech :)

      --
      MLT - simple and robust open source multimedia framework for Linux
  7. What is it with Xerox ... by TheGavster · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".
    1. Re:What is it with Xerox ... by pauljlucas · · Score: 3, Insightful
      It seems that a lot of really nifty things ... were developed at Xerox, and never produced.
      I've heard similar things about IBM Research. While they've not patented everything they've invented, they've invented lots of stuff. But a lot of that stuff never made it to market as products.

      My theory is that this sort of thing tends to happen with large companies that have research divisions. (A notable exception is AT&T which I'll get back to in a bit.) My theory as to why this happens is that management either doesn't "get it" for a lot of the things developed, or is too afraid to take action.

      For the "failure to 'get it'" part, they fail to see how many inventions, as novel as they may be, will be a success in the marketplace. Management in large companies tends to be very short-sighted and often bad predictors of where the market will go.

      For the "too afraid" part, a lot of managers like to keep the status quo because it means low-risk both for the company as a whole and the own careers. No manager wants to sign off on a new product only to have it fail miserably in the market.

      There needs to be a few managers with both vision and guts. If they either sufficiently high-up in the company or have enough convincing power, new products come to market. Sometimes what happens, however, is that they get disgusted with their company's inaction and quit to form start-ups.

      As for AT&T, the reason they've been an exception is because, back in the good old days before divestiture, their research division was focused on doing pure research without any concern for bringing their research to market. They patented lots of things. Indeed, the Bell Labs motto was, "A patent a day," and it was pretty much accurate. However, AT&T never bothered to enforce its patents or sue anybody back then and pretty much gave away their inventions. Why? Because they viewed it as "giving something back" for being allowed to be the benevolent monopoly for the phone company. Of course once divestiture happened, all that changed. It's kind of sad, really.

      --
      If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
  8. Re:Graffiti by jayhawk88 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They'll start offering both. Maybe they drop G2 the next time their licensing from Jot comes around, but I can't imagine thats costing them that much money. In truth there is very little difference between G1 and G2. T's, I's, V's, and making punctuation are the major ones. Long time Palm users had a lot of fun bitching about the change, but realize these are the same people who throw a shit-fit every time the size or shape of the stylus changes by more than a millimeter.

  9. Re:Dear god.. by k98sven · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    That bolt just struck. IBM requested Summary Judgement this week. If it's granted, Linux will be in the clear, and IBM will have a field day with some of their Lanham-act counterclaims.

    Not to mention the DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone cases will fall like the houses of cards that they are. Red Hat should have an easy time with their case. And the Novell case is already not-unlikely to be dismissed.

    The question is, who is going to go on propping up SCO once Linux is out of the picture, and there's just a Kamikaze attack on IBM, hardly likely to leave a dent, left.

  10. Re:Does this mean Graffiti will make a return? by jrockway · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's sites like those that make me happy that I spend most of my time on slashdot. Users of those sites seem to always be afraid of doing something illegal. Hence, someone posts an article on how to transfer a file you own to a device you own and everyone cries about how illegal this is and how the host site is going to be sued to death etc. Then someone replies with a comment that says where to get a file (GASP!! HOW ILLEGAL!!!!) and some goody-two-shoes replies with "admin, please delete all links!!!! :( :( :(" and the whole thread is deleted and everyone who posted banned.

    Once, I was participating in a discussion about the CF driver for NX70 Clies and I said something like "If it's too expensive, warez it." I was banned from loading the site!!! Rather than refuting my argument, they just deleted it. Again, when Decuma came out, someone posted a link to a "warez" version. Any reference to that or the fact that the thread ever existed got you banned. What a bunch of fucking babies.

    So anyway, thank you slashdot, for not deleting posts. I'm glad that people are forced to reply and think about their actions rather than just delete anything they don't like.

    --
    My other car is first.
  11. Software patents are coming to Europe... by BlueUnderwear · · Score: 2, Insightful
    ... and we're just two European Council votes short of preventing this catastrophe. Even the smallest countries (such as Luxembourg, Malta, ...) can make a difference!

    Lobby your representative before May 27th to prevent the worst!

    --
    Say no to software patents.
  12. Re:Does this mean Graffiti will make a return? by Fnkmaster · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Okay, usually I'm willing to say most things are a matter of taste, live and let live and all that. But you've gotta be smoking crack if you think Graffiti 2 is anything other than teh suck. After about half an hour of using my Treo 600, I went on the net, found the instructions for the Graffiti 1 "downgrade" and followed them.


    I don't recall exactly which characters it was, I think it was the 't' and the 'i' that just killed me. The not-quite-one-stroke system feels terribly broken - most of the characters get recognized after one stroke, but a 't' shows up as an 'l' until you do a crossbar, then it disappears and reappears as a 't'... ugh. Likewise with the 'i'. This caused me some serious cognitive dissonance, and I found it far slower than the old one-stroke characters for 't' and 'i' in Graffiti 1. Yes, the middle-screen capital thing is somewhat nice, but didn't matter on my Treo since there is no dedicated Graffiti area (I had to use Graffiti Anywhere to get Graffiti at all on my Treo 600).