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

Does this mean Graffiti will make a return?

[Insideo]

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.

Re:Does this mean Graffiti will make a return?

[los furtive]

Hear hear! I've been going nuts with my Tungsten E, having owned a Palm IIIe for the longest time before. Even after five months I still make the same mistakes. I refuse to be forced to learn yet another alphabet.

Re:Does this mean Graffiti will make a return?

[pauljlucas]

You either love Graffiti 2 or hate it. I too used Graffiti for along time. I always thought some characters were weird, and I never managed to make my letter 'e's such that they'd be recognized as 'e's the first try.

It took me only about a week to switch my brain to using Graffiti 2, but I like it much better. All of the alphabeting characters can be written "normally" and in lower-case. (Grafitti was a weird mix of upper- and lower-case.)

My only complaint about Graffiti 2 is that the "puntuation shift" is too involved what with the leading and trailing upstroke. But overall, I like Graffiti 2 much better.

The ancient family curse!

[AndroidCat]

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.

Graffiti

[someguy456]

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?

Re:Graffiti

[DdJ]

I had Graffiti when it was a separate product for Apple's Newton and General Magic's Magic Cap systems. I had a Palm III, Visor DX, and Visor Pro, running PalmOS. Now I've got a Palm Tungsten T3.

The Tungsten T3 ships with Graffiti 2. It's IMHO awful.

Here's an example of how: The letter "t" is done by a vertical top-to-bottom stroke followed by a horizontal left-to-right stroke. You can do them in either order. The letter L is done by a vertical top-to-bottom stroke. A space is done by a horizontal left-to-right stroke. What happens when you want to begin or end a word with the letter L? Bad things. There are habits you can learn to avoid problems, but it's much more difficult (for me) than Graffiti 1 was.

There's a set of files you can install on a Tungsten T3 or other Graffiti 2 handheld to make it start using Graffiti 1. I've got it installed. It makes the system usable for me.

Now, some of the Graffiti 2 patterns are actually better than Graffiti 1. For example, I can more reliably write a "G" with Graffiti 2 than with Graffiti 1. And some symbols were entered by writing something other than numbers in the numeric area, which was faster than the normal "dot prefix" method from Graffiti 1, and wasn't unreliable or aggravating.

Having a global preference to switch between Graffiti 1 and Graffiti 2 would be a good thing. It's even what the Newton was doing near the end there -- there were multiple recognition systems and you could switch between them.

But even better would be if it could be done on a character-by-character basis. For each letter, give me a list of strokes and let me put checkboxes next to the ones I want to enable.

Re:Graffiti

[cvd6262]

Personally, I like the way other systems, including my Sharp Zaurus, do handwriting input. First, they offer several single or multiple stroke inputs for each letter, then they give you the option on making you own.

The Zaurus even has a utility that lets you draw a stroke and it will tell you the three characters it most resembles, and the percentage of ressemblance. I used to think the keyboard on the Zaurus was the best input method, but I find a customized hand writing input just as effective.

Re:Good news / bad news

[dereklam]

The good news, I guess, is that a dumb patent got invalidated.

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.

Re:Invalid Invalid Invalid

[miffo.swe]

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?

Use in Open Source projects

[sfraggle]

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?

Obvious, and prior art too

[steveha]

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