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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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Palm copied PARC's Graffiti alphabet because the algorithm was so elegant.
Have you tried Graffiti 2? It's slower and less accurate.
Many of the parents wore just not possible before someone came up with a easy way to produce and store electricity. Many of the "inventors" wasnt the ones coming up with the ideas, just the first to patent them. Take Marconi as a nice example of how "good" patents worked back then.
Patents have always been a mess and i dont think any groundbreaking inventions can be said to stem from the patenting system. Military has been the biggest driving force behind new inventions.
The older the better or just selective history?
HTTP/1.1 400
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 ?
With the number of patent applications coming in, it is hard to validate every single one of them completly, not to mention costly. Also remember that things that shouldn't be patentable, IMO, such as software and business models are. The patent clerks don't know everything that is going on in the world, so won't always find prior art in the time allocated.
For the government it is cheaper to let the patentee and the 'infringing' party to fight over it in court.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
There are those who would see this as a vindication of the current system. What's the harm in issuing bad patents when they are inevitably invalidated? I do not share this veiw. Palm has obviously been damaged by Xerox's patent aggression: the cost to license Jot, the R&D and marketing to incorporate it into the product, and the consumer confusion, to say nothing of the effort to actually invalidate the patent.
Until its incentive structure changes, the patent office will continue to hand out patents like leis at a luau. A recent Slashdot article notes that Microsoft is applying for ten a day. That's called working the system (or, as those who have already worked the system say, catching up). I'm willing to believe that a few tens of thousands of the world's highest paid engineers can come up with a few novel ideas, but I also believe that Edison was too liberal in his assessment that genius is only 99% perspiration.
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!
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.
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