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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.
Error! Your patent is invalid. Press the any key.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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.
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?
The original patent was assigned to a Sumerian scribe. I guess any license fees should go to Iraq.
I hated Graffiti 2... long live the original graffiti. Actually, I never stopped using Graffiti because I never upgraded my PalmOS beyond 4.1
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.
Internetnews has this take on the story.
! st1l. hann/t gof us3d to grattit! Z yet,
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.
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
The summary judgment ruling will result in the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by Xerox in 1997 against Palm, Inc.
1997?! 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.
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.
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.
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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/
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".
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!
...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.
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.
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.
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
Lobby your representative before May 27th to prevent the worst!
Say no to software patents.
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?
Not if you are searching for porn.