WordLogic Patented the Predictive Interface

Packetl055 writes "Have any of you heard anything about this company, WordLogic, with a soon to be granted/issued patent with 117 claims for predictability software? They recently received a patent approval/allowance letter from the US Patent and Trademark Office. Their patent application was submitted in March 2000. If I read this correctly, any software that gives you any prediction after you type something is infringing on their patent — e.g. vehicle navigation systems, cellular telephones, PDA's, Google with their 'Did You Mean' when using Google for a search, the new Apple I-Phone, Blackberry, Sony Playstation-3, etc., etc. If true, this is going to be huge: lawsuits after lawsuits." Their stock trend over the last few days suggests that somebody was paying attention to the the USPTO news from August 9. WordLogic makes products (assistive input software) and doesn't seem to be merely a patent troll.

Comments

Prior art.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spelling corrector while you type.

Re:Prior art.

[GuyverDH]

korn shell auto-complete

Re:Prior art.

[ePhil_One]

Clearly the "auto-spell check" doesn't constitute prior art, Its a auto-correct, not predictive. If Korn is the same sort of "predictive" as Bash, where you have to hit tab to "ask" for possible completions, it likely also isn't prior art. I do recall a shell that was predictive (I think in Solaris or SunOS in the 80's) that might, though given the number of patents I assume they patented a "library" of ways to source the "words/suggestions" for predictive auto-complete

Re:Prior art.

[An ominous Cow art]

My first thought was command completion in emacs. I vaguely remember having that in the mid-80s.

Re:Prior art.

[SL Baur]

Emacs command completion isn't predictive, it's the same technology as ksh, etc. command line completion.

Something predictive would be like the Omron Wnn Japanese input processor which will offer you first the most commonly used completion for the sequence you've just typed. Wnn must be prior art, it was extremely clever because it kept track of what you've typed and selected before and as it learned it got pretty good at offering you first what you wanted to type. Something like the T9 dictionary input mode in cellphones, but for Japanese and it was around *a long* time before 2000 - it was integrated with XEmacs in 1997, I believe, and they were up to version 6 of Wnn by then.

Re:Prior art.

[Constantine XVI]

Good news everybody! There is indeed prior art. http://www.google.com/patents?id=_QMjAAAAEBAJ

Re:Prior art.

[cez]

if the Tab to ask would discount the predictability factor, perhaps something along the line of a vxworks based os where it can "predict" what you wanted by abbreviation or first few letters (a common thread in most of their patents I would imagine, you have to start somewhere). A Nortel Passport ex.:

sho lo fi ta = show log file tail

Although the auto-complete occurs after execution, it's not tooo much of a stretch to look at it as "predicting" what was intended.

Re:Prior art.

[geraint-nz]

how about dasher, the prototype was in 1998.

Re:Prior art.

[Anonymous Coward]

What in the hell is dasher besides a very old and not particularly memorable US automobile? Wish there was a -1 clueless moderation for both me and you.

Damn it, Thunderbird!!

[Overzeetop]

Their stock trend over the last few days suggests that somebody was paying attention

I just checked and my damned junk mail filter put that email in the trash!

Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Spy der Mann]

Gee, this thing has got "prior art" written all over its face.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they enjoyed the intellisense autocomplete feature in Visual Studio when they developed the software that their patent is based on.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[ajs]

Don't assume that there's prior art just because the Slashdot summary seems to be similar to things you used in the past. The only measure of valid prior art (other than actually going to court) is when a patent lawyer looks over both the letter of the claims and the claim of prior art. Often, in that light, the prior art turns out to have no relevance.

Patent submitters typically know about the most obvious examples of prior art, so most patents are worded to carefully carve out a niche in which the patent almost, but not quite, describes existing technologies.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that prior art must be exactly what the patent is claiming, but infringing work just needs to be similar to what is claimed?

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[zeromorph]

You are so right.

But the problem actually is that the /.summary contains nearly all the information the press release (it's not an article) contains. If you read it closely it only states that it's in "the predictive input arena" - could be a lot.

The whole thing does not even contain enough information to talk about it on slashdot.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Matteo Vescovi]

J. Carlberger published a paper titled Design and Implementation of a Probabilistic Word Prediciton Program in 1997. That should pretty much take care of the prior art argument.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[5KVGhost]

Patent submitters typically know about the most obvious examples of prior art, so most patents are worded to carefully carve out a niche in which the patent almost, but not quite, describes existing technologies.

Fine. Then the submitter should almost, but not quite, deserve a patent.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[morgan_greywolf]

Because most patent infringement cases are decided by juries. Prior art claims need to be ruled on by a judge, but 12 people, too stupid to get out of jury duty, get to decide if the infringing work actually infringes on the claims.

Don't you just love our court system here in the U.S.? :D

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Prior art claims need to be ruled on by a judge, but 12 people, too stupid to get out of jury duty, get to decide if the infringing work actually infringes on the claims.

I might have written the same comment,... but since someone else has written it (thank you), it occurs to me that a single judge is more easily "purchased" and stupid probably should include me, since I have no desire to pass on the responsibility for deciding some issue that's more important than the average program "smart" people write. [I wonder how I'd reply to this?]

-=-=-

... If we're not part of the problem,... who/what grants us legitimacy to be part of the solution? ....

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Patent submitters typically know about the most obvious examples of prior art, so most patents are worded to carefully carve out a niche in which the patent almost, but not quite, describes existing technologies."

And then they will sue, or threaten to sue, or offer to "license" the technology with as BROAD an interpretation as possible ;-)

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[morgan_greywolf]

since I have no desire to pass on the responsibility for deciding some issue that's more important than the average program "smart" people write. Of course, you don't get to decide which cases for which you sit on jury duty. The potential pool of jurors is decided at 'random' by (usuaully) picking drivers' license #s out of a 'hat'.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[LithiumX]

Did they actually use Visual Studio during their development? IANAL, but I'd get the impression that such a thing would definitively prove direct exposure to prior art previous to their filing the patent in 2000 (since I've been enjoying Intellisense since back in the day in Visual C++ 6.0.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[snooo53]

Prior art doesn't need to be exact. You can have multiple separate references and a obvious motivation for "one skilled in the art" to combine. Not as great as a killer piece that shows everything, but many a court case have been won by combining prior art. There is obviousness too which is harder to prove.

Not the exact answer to your question, but useful to keep in mind

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Walt Dismal]

The paper is described as "The goal of this project was to design and implement a word predictor for Swedish".

I'm going crazy trying to figure out what the software would do for the phrase "bork bork bork".

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[ajs]

"Patent submitters typically know about the most obvious examples of prior art, so most patents are worded to carefully carve out a niche in which the patent almost, but not quite, describes existing technologies."

And then they will sue, or threaten to sue, or offer to "license" the technology with as BROAD an interpretation as possible ;-) Only in the minority of cases.

The vast majority of patent filings never see enforcement. They are used as a "warchest" to implement a system of mutually assured destruction, should one large company decide to sue another. This is why IBM had no problem contributing so many patents to the defense of open source software. It doesn't weaken the primary purpose for which IBM holds those patents.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[SL Baur]

You're correct, but predictive software has been around a long time - Omron was doing Wnn (an extremely clever predictive dictionary engine for entering Japanese) since at least the early 1990's. Still, I'd like to read the patent itself just be clear. I didn't see a link to the patent in TFA.

Maybe they're only patenting stupid T9 dictionaries. The one in my AT&T Samsung is stupid and way behind technology in Japan.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Have Brain Will Rent]

If you look at what they are doing most of the individual elements are not new (check the 1992 book The Reactive Keyboard http://www.amazon.ca/Reactive-Keyboard-John-J-Darr agh/dp/0521403758 ) - however the combination of individual elements *may* be new and sufficiently creative to make for a defensible case against infringers.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Miamicanes]

It's funny you mention IBM, because the BellSouth Simon (the first true wireless PDA, sold by BellSouth in 1992) was made by IBM. Its text input system guessed the 6 most likely letters and displayed them on a touchscreen, with another spot in the middle to go to the next 6 guesses if none of them were relevant. It's hard to describe its logic, but after playing with it for about an hour, you actually DID start to figure it out subconsciously and learn how many times you'd have to tap the center spot & which one of the 6 spots would have the letter you need.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[Pyrroc]

From TFPA

What is claimed is:

1. A method of processing text entered into a personal computing device with a pointing device, the method comprising:
   1. receiving a partial text entry;
   2. obtaining a dynamically generated list of completion candidates based on the partial text entry;
   3. displaying the list of candidates in a search list within a graphical user interface;
   4. receiving a user input signal associated with the pointing device;
   5. if the user input signal corresponds to a first type of user selection with the pointing device, deactivating the search list; and
   6. if the user input signal corresponds to a second type of user selection with the pointing device, replacing the partial text entry with a completion candidate from the search list.

Bah, /. doesn't support the ordered list type attribute. The second ordered list should be a-f not 1-6

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[__aawavt7683]

Indeed. Aside from Clippy, which is the first thing that leapt to mind, I believe Microsoft Bob, from the 80's, implemented predictive interfaces.

Sigh... the USPTO.. I just.. *sigh*

-DrkShadow

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[GooberToo]

but 12 people, too stupid to get out of jury duty,

I always hate it when people use that expression. Another way of interpreting that statement is, hundreds of people too selfish, greedy or stupid to perform their civic DUTY, often prevents the system from working properly. But then these hundreds will go off complain how broken the system is. Its kind of like throwing lit matches around ones home while pointing out how every day items around the house tends to be flamable. So who is really the stupid one?

IMO, there are three serious problems with the current legal system. One, most any moron can be a judge. Judges are not even required to be knowledgable or communicate with a subject matter expert for issues on which they rule. Two, too many laws are writen by lawyers which only benefit lawyers; serving only to generate more billable hours. Three, people try hard to break the legal system by avoiding their civic duty, thereby insuring the "dumb ones", by in large, are on juries. So we have idiot judges ruling on topics well outside of their expertise, often for laws which make no sense, running a trial for jurries too stupid to get out of their duty because the people that should be there lied their way out of it.

Re:Hello, incremental search anyone?

[StikyPad]

While the expression itself may be almost an oxymoron, the process is rather different. First, I wouldn't want any jury there that didn't want to be there, but I think that's the least of the problems, as most people would feel obligated to give due consideration to the case before them (although that may be less likely in a corporation v. corporation scenario). Second, and perhaps more importantly, both sides participate in the jury selection process. If we assume that intelligent people are a small minority of a random group of potential jurors, then either side could easily use their veto to eliminate the entire subset of intelligent candidates, making it less likely that the jury could follow the opposing argument. So even if you, as an intelligent individual, wanted to serve on the jury (which, incidentally, is supposedly a red flag), you'd still be eliminated if one side was determined not to have you.

I predict....

[MarkovianChained]

that they wouldn't get anywhere with a lawsuit.

Re:I predict....

[linumax]

But they'll try, and try hard:

"We are very excited about the obvious opportunities that will be open to WordLogic in the near future."
Frank Evanshen, WordLogic's President and CEO.

Re:I predict....

[AeroIllini]

Hey! Stop predicting what will happen based on what the CEO said!

It's patented, you know.

Re:I predict....

[Tatarize]

I predict that the author of this slashdot article predicted what this patent might result in, and as such is violating the patent!

Wait, shit, I just predicted that.

My goodness, we are all doomed!

Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Patenting the future. Today.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll sue you. I patented this when I patented today yesterday.

And this is new because ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't the underlying idea for this already been implemented in dozens of ways? MS Word has done this for years, cell phones (texting) have done this for years, browser plugins have offered this for years. It's basically pattern-matching against a dictionary. How is this innovative?

Yet another reason why software patents are bad

[Scareduck]

It's just too easy to create infringing code. I don't much like FDR's administration (there's a decent argument that he actually prolonged the Great Depression by his attempt to ram a centralized economy down the country's throat), but one of the good things he did do was to radically cut back the number and scope of patents on the theory that handing out monopolies was a bad idea.

Re:Yet another reason why software patents are bad

[rossz]

Your post being moderated as a "Troll" is proof that people don't understand the moderation system. No doubt some socialist doesn't like you making negative statements about one of their anointed saints.

Re:Yet another reason why software patents are bad

[sweatyboatman]

Well, let's see. The story is about a new software patent that appears to place a lot of currently ubiquitous software/devices in violation. The GP's post is about FDR. And it asserts the rather flimsy premise that the New Deal prolonged the Depression. Since FDR and the depression have nothing to do with WorldLogic or their patent, it's hard to imagine why the poster brings up either point.

So I would say that the GP contributes very little of value to the current discussion. On top of that he injects this questionable revisionist history. Now, I'm willing to believe that the New Deal wasn't all roses and lolly-pops. It's possible that the GP has a point. The article he links to is a troll.

This is from the article:

Roosevelt's revolution began with his inaugural address, which left no doubt about his intentions to seize the moment and harness it to his purposes. Best remembered for its patently false line that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," it also called for extraordinary emergency governmental powers.

So considering that his post had little of interest except this non-sequitor reference to FDR, and considering that his reference to FDR is likely to be inflammatory and is based on a silly article written in 1995, I'd say that it's pretty fair to label it a troll.

Re:Yet another reason why software patents are bad

[kindbud]

Why do right wing sites always have a dead guy as their mascot?

What about Miss Cleo?

[downix]

Would she infringe upon their patent? 8)

Re:What about Miss Cleo?

[i_liek_turtles]

As long as they're incorrect in their predictions most of the time, I'm sure they could milk a lot of money out of her.

Re:What about Miss Cleo?

[Eponymous Bastard]

They'll probably try to sue her anyway.

The big question is: Will she see it coming?

Re:What about Miss Cleo?

[Anonymous Coward]

If she does, she looses the law suite; if she doesn't, she looses reputation. Oh boy! I am sorry for her.

Microsoft to the Rescue!

[hondo77]

Prior art from 1996, anyone. Thank you, Bill! ;-)

Re:Microsoft to the Rescue!

[Speare]

If I recall, the Microsoft Money product was the first in the Windows realm to do this sort of thing. They dubbed it IntelliSense and more apps gained the feature. It was only a slight improvement on the interfaces given by Un*x apps like Emacs years earlier, in that the user didn't need to "ask" the application to try to complete the string. The app merely made a zero-risk completion on every keystroke (zero risk, because the selected text could be dismissed by simply continuing to type).

Re:Microsoft to the Rescue!

[dingleberrie]

How about Command line completion on a computer from the 1960s?

Re:Microsoft to the Rescue!

[m2943]

GNU Emacs had all sorts of autocompletion built in a decade earlier, and there are other examples even before that.

Does this mean I'll be able to turn it off?

[seebs]

I spent half an hour once trying to find a way to disable that in NeoOffice, and never succeeded. I hate that feature so much. It distracts me, and I'm a fast enough typist not to benefit much from it.

Re:Does this mean I'll be able to turn it off?

[seebs]

So, after writing that, it occurred to me to try a search engine. Three minutes later, word completion disabled. WIN!

Re:Does this mean I'll be able to turn it off?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate you

Google Suggest - not "Did you mean"

[sufijazz]

Google Suggest is a better example of predictive text input, isn't it? The concept, however, has been in use in Nokia phones for SMS messages since before 2000.

Seriously?

[Lumbergh]

The I-Phone? Does it work with MACS?

Shouldn't be granted

[Sciros]

Patents this broad on software just shouldn't ever be granted, period. Effectively this patents inference, which is ridiculous. I'm also fairly certain that tech existed prior to 2000 which was capable of predictive i/o. Browser histories, etc.

Re:Shouldn't be granted

[penguinbroker]

Tegic, the owners of t9 started filing patents in 1996, http://www.tegic.com/about/patent-leadership.asp

I didn't read through all the patents but I'm pretty sure worldlogic doesn't have anything on tegic when it comes to the cell phone industry.
just one obvious example of why these patents shouldn't have been granted in the first place..

here's the original t9 patent for reference: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=%2Fnet ahtml%2Fsrchnum.htm&Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&r= 1&l=50&f=G&d=PALL&s1=5187480.PN.&OS=PN/5187480&RS= PN/5187480

Re:Shouldn't be granted

[kidgenius]

Exactly. Patents for "predictive text" shouldn't be allowed, but I have no problem with patenting a particular method for predictive text, like T9. I mean, have as many patents as people want that cover a specific method, but not for EVERY method in existence. It's like allowing me to patent the automobile. I shouldn't be able to patent the whole thing, just be able to patent part of it, like a steering system. I don't see how these patent examiners can't make that relation to non-software items.

Re:Shouldn't be granted

[just_another_sean]

Haven't Vi, Emacs, heck even Visual Studio's Editor had the ability to autocomplete or provide a list of predicted completions for years before 2000?

I'm not sure when the code completion based on language syntax became available in any of these but I could swear that even older vi/vi clones have had the word mapping and completion functions for a long time. And when was auto complete added to the bash/c/korn shells?

I'm too busy to go check dates at the moment but I agree that there is absolutely a ton of prior art on this one.

Re:Shouldn't be granted

[webheaded]

Actually, software patents in general shouldn't be allowed, but that will keep happening until the end of time, I'm sure.

Re:Shouldn't be granted

[martin-boundary]

That's still not good enough. Most specific methods of prediction can be viewed as specializations of more general methods. For example, nearly every method of prediction in the field of statistics is either derived from the method of Maximum Likelihood, or from Bayes' Theorem. Moreover, there are theorems which imply that any consistent method must be equivalent to one of those in some sense.

What this means is that obtaining a specific method of prediction in an application is often a straightforward couple of pages of work starting from one of the general methods. Thus, there is very little original "advancing the state of knowledge" type work involved in creating prediction algorithms: Anybody with proper statistical training can come up with something equivalent. So prediction really shouldn't be patentable, either as an abstract method or as a software method.

Hmmm......

[8127972]

"WordLogic makes products (assistive input software) and doesn't seem to be merely a patent troll."

Just because they make products doesn't mean that they aren't a patent troll.

Re:Hmmm......

[Speare]

Yep, they're a patent troll, but they're not merely a patent troll. Like a pig wearing a tutu isn't merely a pig.

Re:Hmmm......

[Raphael]

And even if they haven't been a patent troll in the past, they may be becoming one.

Let's look at their latest quarterly report (SEC filing) and pick a few bits:

The Company reports a net loss of $840,446 for the six-month period ending June 30, 2007 [...]
For the six-month period ending June 30, 2007, total revenues were $2,673 compared to $9,705 for the six-month period ending June 30, 2006. As the Company is a Development Stage Company its revenue streams are not established and are not impacted by economic or market trends.

Recent Business Activities
On January 9, 2007 the Company announced it had developed a new text entry/text messaging input solution for cell phones utilizing the WordLogic's patent pending prediction engine. [...]

Plan of Operations
A critical component of our operating plan impacting our continued existence is the ability to obtain additional capital through additional equity and/or debt financing. We do not anticipate enough positive internal operating cash flow until such time as we can generate substantial revenues, which may take the next few years to fully realize. In the event we cannot obtain the necessary capital to pursue our strategic plan, we may have to cease or significantly curtail our operations. This would materially impact our ability to continue operations.

So it is a company that is making losses and focuses mainly on a single product. The success of this product depends on the licensing deals related to that patent. It looks like that company is betting a large part of its future on that single patent. So their best hope may be to become a patent troll. It may be a bit sad for the engineers working at that company, but I have serious doubts about their future business plans and methods.

Is it surprising that they issued a press release related to that patent a few days before issuing their quarterly report?

Re:Hmmm......

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to buy their product, when there are free software alternatives: Soothsayer is an intelligent predictive text entry platform. Soothsayer exploits redundant information embedded in natural languages to generate predictions. Soothsayer's modular and pluggable architecture allows its language model to be extended and customized to utilize statistical, syntactic, and semantic information sources.

Re:Hmmm......

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's look at their latest quarterly report (SEC filing) and pick a few bits:

Good catch! This company does not seem to sell much for the moment.

Is it surprising that they issued a press release related to that patent a few days before issuing their quarterly report?

Could this announcement on /. be just a way to get attention and increase their stock value?

I mean, it wouldn't be the first time that /. relays some slashvertisements or pump-and-dump scams...

Re:Hmmm......

[mr_mischief]

That's why they applied for the patent. They don't want the competition.

obvious

[smashin234]

Am I the only one who sees this as too obvious of a process to patent?

Re:obvious

[realthing02]

"The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards."
-Arthur Koestler

Re:obvious

[drachenstern]

"The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards."
-Arthur Koestler "Only when it's a discovery."
-Me

This is like patenting dropping rocks on the ground, not figuring a better design to skip rocks across the lake surface.

Re:obvious

[realthing02]

It's interesting that we don't really have any idea what their patent actually says yet we all know it's incredibly obvious! Why wasn't it patented earlier? Maybe they do something differently? Maybe it's not that fact that they can do it, but rather how they accomplish it that is patented.

You can patent dropping rocks on the ground if your method is new, better, or improved upon the earlier design. a catapult would be a terrific way of "dropping" rocks on the ground.

I won't even get into how the rest of your analogy doesn't apply in the slightest. Plus, it doesn't involve cars.

As if you didn't see this coming:

[Borealis]

I predicted that they'd do that!

Unnecessary Quote from the CEO

[acvh]

"We are very excited about the obvious opportunities that will be open to WordLogic in the near future."

I'll bet you are....

prior art - ALOE circa 1983

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day at CMU, writing PASCAL on the Vax, we were supposed to use ALOE (A Language Oriented Editor) to generate our source code. It was dog slow once the load on the box went up, which caused users to revert to using ... wait for it ... emacs.

Hey - wouldn't line completion in a shell (say bash) be predictive in nature?

Isn't this article an infringement?

[MrMe.Too]

Isn't the article itself an infringement already?
"Have any of you heard anything about this company, WordLogic..."

Sounds like it infringes on their rights. While I am at it, I believe they now own the rights to anyone whoever had Déjà vu!?

Prior Art

[SheldonLinker]

Eeco flight navigation system, some time in the '80s or '90s. Contact me at mailto:sol@linker.com for expenses-only expert or factual testimony if anyone sues you on this nonsense. I've been sued on this sort of nonsense before (and won), and I'll do whatever I can to abate it. Maybe /. can set up an area where patent-fighting experts can help out /.ers on this stuff.

Re:Prior art

[drachenstern]

which begs the question, didn't they merely copyright an inevitable evolution of processing systems?

I have always been led to believe that if there is a natural outgrowth based on logical trends, that you couldn't patent the idea? Like patenting the premise for a machine that can process 4 trillion floating point operations per second.

Re:Prior Art

[CodeShark]

http://www.peertopatent.org/ is where it is at, and they have a mailout list that will keep you informed on new patent apps.

Although I haven't seen one where my knowledge could affect the process, the very first time I hear of a patent application that I can attack with prior art, I will do so immediately.

That way things like this patent don't get so damn close to being approved before we can jump on it.

Re:Prior Art

[Bozdune]

Remanco hand-held terminal point-of-sale system, 1987. Type a letter or two, it guessed at the rest (quite cleverly, actually). Prior art galore.

Re:Prior art

[el americano]

It doesn't beg the question, although it does raise the question.

Re:Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

Its called AI.
AI is really a bunch of rules, a sparse matrix and probability tables, plus some trimming to reorder rules for the shortest path. Then there is context, who is calling and what keywords appeared early. The crap ones just have big history files.
Did they ever hear of the ELIZA program?
There is probably more money to be made by offering Eliza programs to mobiles, and enough stupid people to believe they can have an intelligent relationship with their own phone, ie 50 cent rapper Eliza and Teeny bopper girlfriend Eliza.

In the meantime, some states have Jail time for 'Fortune Tellers', otherwise known as predictive text/speech engines.

Like a spellchecker?

[Just Some Guy]

In what way would this differ from a spellchecker, said technology being available since at least the 1970s?

Re:Like a spellchecker?

[Aetuneo]

Because it starts spell-checking before the word is finished being typed. This is different from normal spell-checkers which wait, for example, until you type a space after the word before checking it. In other words, it would compare every word you type with it's database of commonly used words, as you type it, and give results based on the frequency of the words used. Which is what OpenOffice does (when I correct a word I mistyped it remembers the original and the correction, and gives me the option to press tab (or enter), to select that word), and what my Cellphone does (it gives me a list of commonly used words containing the letters I've typed every time I type in a new letter), and what a lot of other stuff does. I really hope that this patent gets overthrown as obvious.

Re:Like a spellchecker?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

In what way is this the same as a spellchecker? The word "predictive" is kinda relevant.

Re:Like a spellchecker?

[Just Some Guy]

I see. Yes, that should definitely be thrown out, as I know that in 1995 I personally wrote that functionality into a hotel management system (to complete guests' names as you typed them), and I certainly didn't invent it myself.

command completion?

[cdn-programmer]

I've not read the claims of course, but from the description if _any_ form of completion is claimed then it would seem to me that prior art would include command line completion as well. We've had things like this since the 70's in many forms.

If I read this correctly

[Anonymous Coward]

You are concluding what a patent covers without even seeing the claims, based upon a corporate press release.

Par for the course....

yawn

Re:If I read this correctly

[Mundocani]

Nobody has even posted the patent for us to read, a couple of people speculate that this is nothing more than auto-completion, and some Slashdot readers start screaming "prior art! prior art!"

I went to the company's website and watched their demo, it doesn't appear that their product is simply auto-completion. It seems to be context-sensitive completion and I suspect that plays an important role in what they're claiming.

Maybe it is a stupidly obvious patent and maybe it isn't. Reading a few opinions about what the patent might involve and getting all worked up over that speculation serves no purpose at all. But, as the parent put it, that's par for the course.

Re:If I read this correctly

[polygamous coward]

You went to the Web Site! I could have predicted this.

Prior art

[Harmonious Botch]

I remember something like this running on a Kaypro 10 using CPM back in the 80s.

Mod_spell in apache was doing this in 1996

[Anonymous Coward]

And I've seen other things earlier than that. Mod_spell has been asking people about alternate spellings for a long time before this patten was filed, no?

bad links

[gravesb]

Editors, for these stories, please include a link to the patent, not just the news release and a general description.

Re:bad links

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears to be application 20070061753.

Seems pretty broad, but very specific. Oh, and it only has 42 claims. (109 paragraphs)

Re:bad links

[ThosLives]

Eh, insert "is actually" between "but" and "very" in my original post.....

Re:bad links

[gravesb]

That was filed in 2004, and has a different assignee. Although, I wonder how that patent interacts with the one that is the subject of the story.

Re:bad links

[Fongboy]

Maybe not... Part of that application says: "Although there are some word suggestion systems already existing like WordLogic..." They could be referring to their own product, but it sounds like they're referring to somebody else's work.

Re:bad links

[Fongboy]

The story says that the patent isn't granted yet, and has an application date in 2000. The USPTO's patent application search only goes back to 2001. Anybody know of some other source that goes back to 2000?

Re:bad links

[kcbrown]

Editors, for these stories, please include a link to the patent, not just the news release and a general description.

The "editors" don't appear to do anything else at all (except perhaps issue a pithy comment or two in the story description), so why would they do this?

I wish I weren't being serious. :-(

Re:bad links

[SL Baur]

That's not the patent you're looking for. Those are guys in Singapore, not Canada and the application date is 2004 not 2000.

Supermarket coupons.

[HockeyPuck]

When I check out at my local grocery store, I've consistently received coupons for "similar products that I might like" since the 80s. Buy Ben n Jerry's ice cream? Get a coupon for Breyers. Something is predicting I might like another brand of ice cream.

I've been getting these coupons since the early 90s.

We should be able to sue this coupon for "wasting taxpayer dollars" similar to how you can be fined for pulling a fire alarm as a prank.

Re:Supermarket coupons.

[piojo]

When I check out at my local grocery store, I've consistently received coupons for "similar products that I might like" since the 80s. Buy Ben n Jerry's ice cream? Get a coupon for Breyers. Something is predicting I might like another brand of ice cream.

I've been getting these coupons since the early 90s.
  Yeah, those sure are annoying. Good thing prediction has been patented. Maybe spammers will have to stop predicting that I want "my sexual life more different and easier!", or I'll "impress my girl with a WonderCum!"

Cell Phones... gadgets...

[Panaflex]

Pretty sure I've seen predictive input for a LONG time... some examples..

Cell phone input (T9 & iTap circa 1995)
PDA writing interfaces (Newton?)
Shell command line completion. (bash, ksh)
Visual Studio 6...
Emacs
Windows 3.1 tablet edition
Automatic spell checking correction ( MS word 95, possibly before)

I'm sure there's tons more here... but wiring a dictionary up to an input is obvious prior art, no matter how you spin it.

Re:Cell Phones... gadgets...

[RetroGeek]

Automatic spell checking correction ( MS word 95, possibly before)

Definately before. I was using this on my Z100 with a product named WatchWord. It had spell-as-you-type. On an 8088 running at 4.7MHz (yes, that is megaherz) back in the '80s.

Re:Cell Phones... gadgets...

[just_another_sean]

Cell phone input (T9 & iTap circa 1995)
PDA writing interfaces (Newton?)
Shell command line completion. (bash, ksh)
Visual Studio 6...
Emacs
Windows 3.1 tablet edition
Automatic spell checking correction ( MS word 95, possibly before) I couldn't help but notice your subtle attempt to start a flame war by failing to mention vi!

Re:Cell Phones... gadgets...

[Panaflex]

Well, actually I'm a daily vim user... LOL... I just didn't have a clue as to when command/filename completion was added to VI.

Re:Cell Phones... gadgets...

[Incadenza]

Automatic spell checking correction ( MS word 95, possibly before)

Definitely LONG before. When I was in my teens (and that was 30 years ago) my father was a COBOL programmer on UNIVAC machines. I remember that he boasted that he had shortened the time needed for typing long programs because he had abbreviations automatically expanded into their long form, as he typed. Haven't got a clue whether he had made that himself or whether it was a standard feature of the editor used.

Re:Cell Phones... gadgets...

[just_another_sean]

Well then I'm one to talk because I also use it a lot but was too lazy to go look up any dates as to when it's
various completion features were added. :-)

Re:Pig in a Tutu

[andrewd18]

Of course it's not merely a pig. It's Dancer Pig!

Dancer Pig! Dancer Pig!
Does whatever a Dancer Pig does!
Can it dance
In ballet?
No it can't,
'Cause it's a pig.
Look out!
Here comes the Dancer Pig!

Does anybody know....

[TW Atwater]

... if anyone has a patent on wheels? I see thousands of them everyday, and if no one has the patent I could get rich.

mod parent UP

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA contains no useful information; it doesn't even give us the patent number.

T9

[jeti]

Nokia introduced T9 in 1999 with the Nokia 3210.
Should count as prior art and is widely known.

Re:T9

[Matteo Vescovi]

T9 is a bit different from a true predictive text entry system. T9 is more accurately described as a disambiguating text entry system. It does not predict what word will be entered next, but rather cycles through the possible words that could correspond to the keys pressed. It's much easier than true word prediction because the number of characters of the word to be "predicted" is known.

Re:T9

[leenks]

No, the number of characters typed so far is known. Pattern matching is then performed against the start of words in a dictionary that match the pattern, starting with the shortest matches.

This is OLD

[jpetts]

I used to be a sysop at Imperial College Computer Centre in London, and the mainframes I worked with, a Cyber 176, and a CDC7600 had this on the console back in 1978. It was also available on the 6600, which was a 60s era machine.

More Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

Sony Magic Link, released and sold publicly in 1994, predicted email addresses as you typed them in under the General Magic "MagicCap" OS, if I recall correctly.

BTW, there is no 'published application' on USPTO.gov, nor any Issued Patent which contains 'WordLogic'.

Let's hope their claims (has anyone seen them?) are sufficiently obscure that this is not a 'broad' patent, and that they use it defensively.

There are two other granted patents, 6,744,423 and 7,218,249 which cover 'predictive' and 'text entry' in their abstracts, so this latest entrant may not be a sign of the apocalypse.

Re:More Prior Art

[Creepy]

I'm pretty sure their European patent (granted in 2004) is used as a basis by the description. That patent # is 1171813 (I got my info off this site

From the description it appears to be the same, at least, and it does pretty much describe a form of autocomplete (when a list of choices is displayed not a single choice). I don't know if it requires some form of activity to show the choices, but this sounds a like pressing cont-D after set filec in the csh (tcsh, zsh and bash use tab completion, but filec is much older) as applied to just about any device (like the described pointer pointing at a character).

Re:More Prior Art

[Eponymous Bastard]

I wonder about Stephen Hawking's software. IIRC he selects the beginning of a word (by timing) and then a menu of possible completions are shown.

Though maybe the patent examiner did look at these things (tab completion, intellisense, interfaces for the disabled) since they are relatively well known, and only granted the claims for new things.

Prior Art?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in '96 in college, as an industry sponsored class project my project group wrote a interactive on screen keyboard application that when you typed in a letter it updated a hot list of possible word selections from a dictionary. This was so a person with a disability could jump over to it and select a word instead of selecting each of the characters in the word. It used a row scanning system on screen and then scanned columns based on a person doing the equivalent of a single mouse click.

Reactive Keyboard

[DLPierson]

Here are a couple more prior art candidates references:

http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLAbsToc.jsp?re sourcePath=/dl/mags/co/&toc=comp/mags/co/1990/11/r ytoc.xml&DOI=10.1109/2.60879
http://books.google.com/books?id=obxCY0wcaTgC&dq=& pg=PP1&ots=xNhr72NKWt&sig=n8bM_SOzg7Trzj04Y1Xgx2tb dng&prev=http://www.google.com/search%3Fq%3Dreacti ve%2Bkeyboard%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26rls%3Dor g.mozilla:en-US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X &oi=print&ct=title#PPP1,M1

The big issue

[webrunner]

We have a situation where prior art isn't related enough for, but it is related enough that you can sue products the same technology that came out after the patent was issued?

IntelliSense pre-2000 isn't infringing, but 2000 on is? How does this make sense?

Prior art from 1969

[bzipitidoo]

Command line completion has been around since 1969 on the PDP-10, in TENEX.

To show how broad these patents could get, many data compression algorithms are based on prediction. LZ78 (from 1978) seems especially similar, as it generates a dictionary (of words, in a sense) from data it has seen, to predict what is coming next. Might that be prior art? Statistics, too, has much from decades and even centuries ago that could be prior art. Bayesian probability, Markov processes... It would be incredible if the patent office let stuff as broad as that get by, but who knows?

Existing free software alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Free software alternatives exist: a promising project is Soothsayer.

Soothsayer is an intelligent predictive text entry platform. Soothsayer exploits redundant information embedded in natural languages to generate predictions. Soothsayer's modular and pluggable architecture allows its language model to be extended and customized to utilize statistical, syntactic, and semantic information sources.

Re: oops?

[Anonymous Coward]

Grandparent wrote:

by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24, @03:06PM (#20346997)
It appears to be application 20070061753 [uspto.gov].
Seems pretty broad, but very specific. Oh, and it only has 42 claims. (109 paragraphs)

Parent wrote:

by ThosLives (686517) on Friday August 24, @03:10PM (#20347029)
Eh, insert "is actually" between "but" and "very" in my original post.....

Darn registered users trying to take credit for AC posts... ;P

Thank God

[Psicopatico]

Thank God software patents are void in Europe (UK excluded, IIRC).

Quote.

[Meor]

If I read this correctly
No, you're reading it incorrectly.

YARTDSP

[colin_faber]

Yet Another Reason to Disallow Software Patents. Copyrights do a fine job covering software related rights issues. This kind of garbage has to stop.

Prior Art...

[jschmerge]

I believe the Korn and Bash shell are both examples of prior art here... The Korn shell was in existance long before this patent application, and I believe bash has been around as long as well.

Don't stress

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't worry too much about it. Prentke-Romich Company and Dynavox have had products on the market for a while that include word prediction for assistive technology. It's probably some idiosyncratic spin on word prediction in some particular user interface.

Beyond that, there have been peer-reviewed publications about word prediction for years and years. Some of the early stuff was in the 80's surrounding the CHAT project, which used a word prediction system named PAL.

In response to some of the comments, most prediction systems for assistive technology use a bit more information than the T9, which (afaik) uses just a straight-up frequency-sorted word list, which ignores context. The T9 is a bit different in that the system is given the same exact constraint every time you type a given word, whereas in word prediction, you're iteratively given the secondary constraint (the prefix of the word) and it's better if you guess the word sooner, but there isn't a concept of sooner or later guessing with the T9 (unless they changed it), it just has the prediction list.

Trouble in Japan

[bgspence]

All those old Japanese Kanji text input methods are going to be invalid.

They go way back...

I met them - they're not a patent troll

[Geof]

I met with them earlier this year. I don't think they're patent trolls. They develop and sell products; though nothing came with it, they were interested in technical cooperation. For the businessman I spoke to, the patents were evidence of their technical innovation and a point of pride. Most of us on Slashdot see patents differently, but his perspective is how they have been seen in other industries and in the past. Of course, this was just one guy (though senior) and may not reflect the company as a whole - or their lawyers. I don't mean to defend the patents (I would be happy to see software patents abolished), but the company I saw was a technical firm, not a legal one.

The product they showed me lets you create a dictionary of common phrases (which can be very long), then retrieve and input them easily using their predictive input algorithm to drill down through multiple possibilities. The software sits on top of Windows, essentially between the keywoard and whatever app you're using. It reminded me somewhat of Stephen Hawking's system (which I vaguely recall having seen on TV once) or Chinese word processor software which allows you to type in a syllable, then pops up a list of matching characters and lets you pick one by typing a number (though the fellow I spoke with wasn't familiar with this). Example uses described to me included lawyers, who might want to pull up whole paragraphs of boilerplate text, and students (I don't recall the use case for this).

Re:I met them - they're not a patent troll

[jp10558]

Ummm, like PhraseExpress? http://www.phraseexpress.com/docs4/09/shop.php I know I've seen others that are similar for years.

That alone is at version 4... If they applied for a patent in 2000 why isn't there a more well known product?

Re:I met them - they're not a patent troll

[Geof]

Possibly. I'm not making any claims about the quality of their products or the legitimacy of their patents - only saying that I don't think they're a patent troll, which I understand as a company whose business centers on licensing patents rather than developing technology or selling products.

Re:I met them - they're not a patent troll

[epine]

I can supply prior art on predictive Chinese input (pinyin/bopomofo to simplified/classical hanzi) dating back to the mid-eighties on a 4.77MHz PC, becoming quite sophisticated by the early 1990s: also hanzi back to pinyin (with disambiguation), pinyin to pinyin with correct tone markings, and romaji/hiragana to kanji. The first version involved a hardware expansion card to supply the Chinese character fonts, which were too large to handle in PC memory at the time. The version from the early 1990s was set up like a Soduko puzzle: you could constrain the character options for any syllable by any character property (pinyin syllable, tone, stroke count, principle radical, any arbitrary subset) and it would solve for the most likely hanzi sequence matching those constraints. It had a moderately large dictionary of common hanzi phrases, and a generative grammar to handle number-measure expressions. At the time I last worked on it, the statistical model wasn't fully fleshed out to the extent of a word model in a fully developed speech recognition system, but it was headed that direction. It was also specifically tuned to resolve the most common ambiguities present in standard pinyin transcription, with a couple of unsolvable problems left to squirt out the sides: most users created a custom annotation to distinguish ta=he from ta=she. After the first conversion, if the hanzi sequence was incorrect, the user could select any incorrect character and ask for the next most likely conversion (at isolated character or full phrase levels), select the correct character manually and have the rest of the phrase updated for congruence, or just eliminate that character as undesired, and have the conversion resolved with the addition of a new constraint: e.g. position three does not resolve to character X.

We never went to the next level with the negative inference that if the user conventionally writes ta=she as taa, the syllable ta becomes unlikely to resolve to the female pronoun, but even that refinement was obvious within the framework.

Not all of this was brought out to the user interface at the time. We were trying not to scare people with too many options.

A related problem was automatically recognizing the text sort of a document the user was composing, and constraining the word model accordingly. That's a very difficult problem. If the program adapts too much, it throws the user off of their regular expectations. There are some clear cut examples, however. A government statistician working on demographic models is rarely called upon to discuss pubic issues (but few spell checkers are configured to flag this embarrassment, as it's also a perfectly legal spelling).

Good textual discretion might be original. This patent isn't.

This might be the text of the patent

[Fongboy]

I'm not sure if this really is the patent in question... but it might be it:
USPTO application 20040021691

It's from a later year than the application mentioned in the story, but I think it might be the same one with an updated date or something. Here's how I got to the application:

WordLogic's 10-K filing mentions some patent applications. In particular, it mentions some titled "Method, system and media for entering data in a personal computing device". I found an application matching this, but it's date is in 2004. However, it references the european patent application CA2323856 with a date of Oct 18, 2000 (this just about matches the date mentioned in TFA... different from the date mentioned in the original post). This european patent says that it is also filed as US patent application US2004021691. If you look at that number, it's the same as the USPTO application that I linked to above.

Re:This might be the text of the patent

[Anonymous Coward]

This PCT and US application are NOT assigned to wordlogic. This is not their applications.

Re:This might be the text of the patent

[Fongboy]

Perhaps. But take a look at the 10-K that I linked to. They mentioned european patent application 1171813. This lists "GUNN HAROLD DAVID (CA)" as an inventor. The application that I linked to lists "Gunn, Harold David; (Vancouver, CA)" as an inventor. That's probably not a coincidence.

Re:This might be the text of the patent

[Fongboy]

Okay, here we go... here's why it's not assigned to WordLogic. In their 10-K, it says:

"... WordLogic Corporation and its wholly owned subsidiary 602531 British Columbia Ltd. ..."

And the european patent applications list British Columbia Ltd as the applicant.
So maybe they're trying to hide the connection to WordLogic? Or maybe it's a legit subsidiary.

Re:This might be the text of the patent

[NopeSorryMeridian]

A final office action rejecting all pending claims in the above referenced U.S. Patent Application was issued on 7-17-2007. The pending claims are 1-8, 11-20, and 23-25. There is no record of an amendment entered in response to the final action. It is highly unlikely that this is correct application.

Stop Shilling for This Company!

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick search of the US patent office and the Canadian patent office (they appear to be from Canadia) does not turn up any published patent applications. Therefore, it is highly likely that very, very narrow claims (i.e., worthless) were allowed and the company published this "big news" to drive up it's stock price and make waves. By publicizing their press release like this, you are simply helping hype this no-name company and their stock. Companies do this all the time. Please wise up!

I for one...

[tbcpp]

...welcome our new Clippy killing overlords.

LISP DWIM (Do What I Mean)

[karl.auerbach]

Lisp has had a Do What I Mean (DWIM) capability for decades upon decades.

Folio Views did/does this too

[coldmist]

In the 'Search' dialogue, Folio Views had this since 1994/1995. If you typed in 'lov', it would then show a list of words in the document that started with 'lov', like 'love', 'loving', etc. The top-most from the list was also highlighted in your text entry box similar to how FireFox displays a matching URL, and then you hit 'enter' and it would skip the cursor past this word to 'accept' the predicted word, and then you could start typing your next word.

Re:Folio Views did/does this too

[BoberFett]

I personally wrote software which did this back in 1995. It was a search engine built with features specifically for legal documents and the front end had very similar functionality to what you're describing. It's really not a huge leap of creativity to imagine that given the first few letters of a word, you can look up all words that begin with those letters. People have been looking things up in the dictionaries and other reference books using such a system for hundreds of years.

prior art to 'patent the automobile'

[smellsofbikes]

The Wright Brothers patented a specific method for controlling airplane maneuvering, and then claimed that every other implementation of aircraft control fell under that patent, a litigation fight (mostly with Glenn Curtiss) that set aircraft development in the US back probably 10 years, during its most volatile period. Essentially, people have tried, in the past, to patent the automobile. This isn't a new technique, it's just a new venue.

Re:prior art to 'patent the automobile'

[samkass]

The Wright Brothers patented the method of inducing roll by differentially changing the angle of attack of each wing. It was the key invention that made the controllable airplane, and the many requests Curtiss made to the Wrights for details (promising only to use them non-commercially) shows Curtiss deception in that area. I'd call the Wright's patent a great example of when the patent system worked. The Wrights innovated, Curtiss stole, and the Wrights successfully sued them for it in exchange for reasonable licensing fees (they didn't shut down Curtiss aircraft or refuse to license, despite actively building their own aircraft.)

Prior Art

[WScottC]

Bash

Prior art from the 1960s

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember the old command completion on pdp10 monitors circa late 1960s?
That certainly was predicting what you might type and offering possible completions as a (very successful) command interface feature.

Follow up?

[JCWDenton]

Stuff like this usually get me excited (for reasons unknown) but a follow up on /. would be nice. Same with the patent covering technologies where user interface and code in a s/w project are separated. i.e. describing the UI in XML. Whatever happened to that (the excitement at the time mainly consisted of fantasies of a patent troll (M$) getting a taste of its own medicine). Anyone remember that post?

U.S. Application Serial No. 09/631,101

[NopeSorryMeridian]

The correct patent is serial no. 09/631,101. http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/!ut/p/kcxm l/04_Sj9SPykssy0xPLMnMz0vM0Y_QjzKLN4gPMATJgFieAfqR qCLGpugijnABX4_83FT9IKBEpDlQxNDCRz8qJzU9MblSP1jfWz 9AvyA3NDSi3NsRAHxEBJg!/delta/base64xml/L0lJSk03dWl DU1lKSi9vQXd3QUFNWWdBQ0VJUWhDRUVJaEZLQSEvNEZHZ2RZb ktKMEZSb1hmckNIZGgvN18wXzE4TC8xNS9zYS5nZXRCaWI!#7_ 0_18L

Japanese prior art patents from 1989

[barwasp]

Fongboy found their (likely) patent application. That paper tells they use dictionaries in predicting input text in various computer devices. Well, I found these two 1989 patents with very relevant summaries.

First patent is using dictionaries in predicting incoming text

1) SYSTEM AND DEVICE FOR PREDICTION OF SUBJECT ( JP1029972 )
PURPOSE:To analyze the content of a text based on prediction, by analyzing an inputted text by using the grammatical rule of a targeted language, predicting the subject of the text from a word possible to regulate the subject, and predicting the subject predicted from the largest number of words as the subject of the inputted text. CONSTITUTION:The titled device is provided with a subject dictionary 1 in which the candidate of the subject predicted from each word is registered in every word unit, and a subject indicating word segmentation part 2 which analyzes the inputted text grammatically and extracts the word to become the main constituent of the input text. At a subject selection part 3, the subject dictionary 1 is referred, and when no subject candidate to be predicted exists in every word unit extracted at the subject indicating word segmentation part 2, no operation is performed, and when it exists, it is taken out, and the number of taking out is held at every taken out subject candidate, and when the taking out and the counting of the number of appearance are completed, the subject candidate having the largest number of appearance out of taken out subject candidates is outputted as the subject of the inputted text. In such a way, the subject of a supplied text can be predicted. The second patent uses previous text inputs in helping to predict the incoming text

2) METHOD AND DEVICE FOR PREDICTING SUBJECT> ( JP2280272 )
PURPOSE:To analyze the content of a text based on prediction by holding the set of micro features having the number of times of appearance exceeding a critical value as the present status, and assuming a subject expressed in the partial set of the micro features most neighboring to the above set as the present subject. CONSTITUTION:A recent appearance word meaning storage means 2 stores meaning by the expression of the micro feature of a constant number of words appearing recently, and a critical value filter 3 delivers only the micro feature in which the number of times of appearance of the micro feature existing in the recent appearance word meaning storage means 2 exceeds the critical value to a present status storage means 4. A most neighoring subject selection means 6 compares the set of the micro features held by the present status storage means 4 with the expression of the micro feature corresponding to individual subject in a subject dictionary 5, and outputs the subject having the least common part as the present subject. In such a manner, the content of the text can be analyzed based on the prediction.
I predict WordLogic's patent application is not viable.

Re:Japanese prior art patents from 1989

[SL Baur]

Fongboy found their (likely) patent application. That paper tells they use dictionaries in predicting input text in various computer devices. Well, I found these two 1989 patents with very relevant summaries. I read their abstract and indeed, that kind of stuff has been done in Japan since the 90's. Good job.

Not the point

[the grace of R'hllor]

Very often, especially for a smaller company, the goal of getting a patent isn't holding up larger companies for large wads of dough. It's a protective measure.

Another company, the aggressor, walks up and says "Hey, we own the patent to that technology!". Hero says "So? So do we!". Rather than slugging it out, where aggressor might well lose the patent (since they're just being litigious and Hero is actually making products), they might as well go after someone else who *didn't* patent it.

It's fucking stupid, but that's your patent system for you :-)

Prior Art: Shell Autocompletion

[gweihir]

Should be about 20-30 years old....

Re:Pig in a Tutu

[MooUK]

And if there's anyone who doesn't know which film based on a very long running and highly popular animated TV series the parent was paraphrasing, you're missing out and should find out and go watch it immediately.

who cares says patent this:

[Anonymous Coward]

Claim: A method to record public and/or registered users viewing of stock information that site provides.
Then using that data in conjunction with a predictive algorithm to determine future stock fluctuations.

[old idea.]

Around 1972

[alw53]

Someone at Bell labs wrote a paper about CATS, a Computer-Assisted Typing System,
around 1972. I can't find it at the moment.

Pryor Art

[Mundocani]

I searched Google and came up with this example of Pryor art:

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/b/b0 /Rp1.jpg

Predictive INPUT not Predictive TEXT

[jkgamer]

Does anyone here ever read these patents before posting how stupid they supposedly are? Reading the patent clearly shows that they are not applying for a patent on predicting text alone, but rather on an input method used by most PDA's and visual keyboards. In addition to displaying possible words, it HIGHLIGHTS the keys on the visual keyboard or displays the input strokes required to generate the next character that it thinks you want to select. Visual Studio never lit up characters on my keyboard, it never even displayed a visual keyboard on my screen. I'm all for patent reform and striking down obvious techniques, but in this case, while IANAL, on its face value it looks pretty legitmate to me.

(Not entirely sure that its all that much more useful than the standard predictive text stuff that I've already seen or used, but that is not the point.)

Circular Reference.

[Valdrax]

And if there's anyone who doesn't know which film based on a very long running and highly popular animated TV series the parent was paraphrasing, you're missing out and should find out and go watch it immediately.

Thanks. 'Cause we're sure to get the reference once we watch the film after getting the reference to know what to watch.

Re:Circular Reference.

[MooUK]

If you need a hint, then the colour yellow might be of use.

Re:Circular Reference.

[Valdrax]

I don't have television or kids, so it's not particularly helpful.
Could you spell it out?

Timeline!

[stonecypher]

While people rightly point out other prior art, like Microsoft's 1996 IntelliSense patent that I just read in someone else's comment, I'd like to be the first to point out that several BBSes, including Renegade, Tag, Opus and WWIV, offered this as early as the mid-1980s. The first time I personally saw predictive autocomplete was in the door .QWK reader for Hydra - a BBS so old that it thought running on an Atari was a good idea - in probably 1983 or so. That's back in the days when 600 bits per second sounded fancy, and when people still yelled at salesfeeps when they tried to quote baud (because back then, the difference was important.)

While I'm at it, get me my corn cob pipe; I'd like to talk about the civil war. *creak*

you read it wrong

[m2943]

The company has a demo and a web site, and I don't see anything novel about what they describe.

However, several decades of real-world experience and prior art also have shown that this kind of technology isn't very useful, except perhaps for the disabled, and they already have input devices supporting it.

Did Edison invent the "light bulb"...?

[simplerThanPossible]

No. He invented (and patented) one particular version of the light bulb that had commercial advantages.

Did Morse invent the telegraph? (yes, the morse code guy)
No, he invented a particular version that had commercial advantages.
(incidentally, he later added a patent claim to cover any kind of telegraph - this claim was thrown out)

FEPs (IMEs)

[Nishi-no-wan]

Such predictive systems were on most computers in Japan in the 1980s. They were known then as Front End Processors, renamed to Input Method Editors (to be different?) in the 1990s by Microsoft. The better ones (ATOK) could lead you along as you typed in Japanese for the correct Kanji choice for the Hiragana (pronunciation alphabet) entered.

Any engineer who'd spent time in Japan (typing in Japanese) in the 1980s could have brought this idea back with them for entering English. The need just didn't arise for English speakers (typers) until more recently, but the idea and tech are old.

Quite a restricted patent in Europe

[Anonymous EPA]

The European equivalent is EP-B-1171813, and the main claim requires an infringing system to have a "digital keyboard" and that the system mys display the digital keyboard on the user interface as the user enters text a keystroke at a time. The digital keyboard can be replaced with a display of completion candidates, but it is a requirement of the patent that the digital keyboard re-appear if there are no completion candidates.

This is well short of patenting the predicative interface. I expect that very few systems indeed will infringe this.

Has anyone actually inspected the US file to see the claims that have been allowed in the USPTO, or is everyone just speculating?

It will be a few months before the US patent is granted and the final form of the claim is readily available. Remember that the claims of the published US application

Speculating on what a patent covers without inspecting the claims rarely is helpful, especially if you take the word of the patent's applicant as to what it covers.

A See, on Esp@cenet: http://v3.espacenet.com/origdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=WO00 57265&F=0&RPN=EP1171813&DOC=cca34af1985008c67e3df5 af7830d7a74e

Computers in Independence Day, Patent Law on /.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was a serious software engineer, I used to cringe whenever I saw something related to computers on the movies... mostly because they were so off the mark in the way they used/described computers in the film... one case in point... Indpendence Day where the guy is uploading a virus to an alien spaceship and he has a nice little GUI showing the status of the virus upload... obviously totally silly... at a time of crisis, I am sure a real software guru is going to slap together a fancy gui and debug it, rather than just use a command line interface. Of course, the movie got some things right... like using the term "uploading" and "virus"... but, come on... the guy is gonna build a GUI when the earth is going to be enslaved?

In similar fashion, now... that I've worked with patent law for several years... Reading slashdot comments related to patent law makes me cringe... man, you guys are way off the mark... sure, you use proper terms like "prior art"... but, yikes... hurts me to read this stuff

So glad and so sad.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sometimes so glad that we don't have software patents in the UK. This particular one is a good example of the ones where only the lawyers make money by sueing other companys.
However this also seems to be a case where lots of prior art exists, like the given examples of intellisence and predictive texting on phones this is NOT really an invention of anything. And as for predictive software, ALL weather pridictions are built on preditions, we call them models, but its the same thing.

People already tried that...

[Ecuador]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1418165.st m