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.

Comments

Good news / bad news

[jbellis]

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?

Re:Good news / bad news

[MartinG]

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?

Re:Good news / bad news

[Dun Malg]

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.

Invalid Invalid Invalid

[MajorDick]

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

Re:Graffiti

[magsilva]

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.

Re:Graffiti

[Just Some Guy]

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).

What is it with Xerox ...

[TheGavster]

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.

Re:Does this mean Graffiti will make a return?

[jrockway]

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.