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Microsoft Applies For Patent On Tufte's Sparklines
jenkin sear writes "Data visualization guru Edward Tufte developed Sparklines, a great way to display condensed data as an inline graphic. Excel's new version has incorporated the design element — and Microsoft has applied for a patent on them — without so much as a by-your-leave from Tufte."
It is very obvious that Microsoft has never payed much attention to design concepts, especially user interface design concepts.
The patent is obviously bad. As the summary states, there is plenty of prior art. If you read the patent, it's also trivial - it's just making graphs smaller.
Will the USPTO reject it?
Maybe.
But even if they do, we also need to ask:
Will anyone at Microsoft be fined or imprisoned for applying for this bogus patent?
Unfortunately, not.
A comment on the blog post discussing the feature (to which TFS links) says:
They haven’t tried to patent sparklines, but the use of sparklines in Excel. I.e. the automatic updating of a sparkline embedded in a spreadsheet.
Cue the posts on how obvious and stupid the patent is regardless of this below. Point is, it's not an attempt on something already claimed by someone.
This is one of those issues I'd love to hear a real patent attorney weigh in on: If someone files a patent on something you can prove you demonstrated publicly at an earlier date, what are your options? Can you file an opposition to the patent? How does it work?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
http://wondermark.com/555/
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
The most general claim of the patent, claim number 1, is:
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
First, the actual claims are considerably narrower than just 'any and all uses of sparklines.' The broadest claim is about the use of sparklines in a dynamically updated electronic document. Most of the narrower claims have to do visual effects, the handling of null values in the spreadsheet, etc. This is pretty tame stuff.
Second, this is a newly filed application. The examiner will almost certainly come back with multiple rejections based on obviousness, and the claims will likely be narrowed in response. Like most negotiations, the parties start off with extreme positions and work towards compromise.
Third, the patent application already cites Tufte (along with a dozen other pieces of prior art) in the Information Disclosure Statement. In other words: Microsoft gave the patent examiner many important pieces of prior art. The examiner will no doubt find many more. This is all publicly available through the Patent Office's Patent Application Information Retrieval system.
Fourth, there is no need for Microsoft to acknowledge Tufte as an inventor on the patent application. Inventorship in the patent context is a legal term of art with a specific meaning. The fact that Microsoft said that Tufte invented sparklines is not the damning piece of evidence many are assuming it is (and recall from point three, above, that Microsoft acknowledged Tufte in its IDS). First, Tufte invented sparklines more than a year before the filing date, so any patentable claims must be a non-obvious improvement upon or use of sparklines, not sparklines themselves. Second, Tufte clearly did not work with the Microsoft inventors, so he cannot be a co-inventor of anything claimed in this application.
Once again non-experts hear hoofbeats and scream 'Zebra Stampede!' The comments on Tufte's site, for example, are a joke, an absolute mess of uninformed speculation. Given the wealth of publicly available information on patents and patent application, the Slashdot editors should do more to fact check these stories before publishing them.
Finally, I'll just tack on that if sparklines are so great and this is all so obvious, then surely there's an open source version that predates this application. Remember, though, that this application was filed on May 7, 2008, so the open source version would need to predate that, preferably (but not necessarily) by a year or more. That would actually be an important piece of prior art.
Over on the Microsoft Excel Team Blog they even give Edward Tufte credit as the inventor of these sparklines.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
By the obvious twisting of what is actualy being patented here, is timothy the new kdawson?
They should patent Tourette instead, so maybe the rest of the world stop getting its symptoms every time they make a move.
Either it's way past my bedtime, or the market is over-saturated with Twilight crap, or both, but...
I totally read that as "Tufte's Sparkliness".
I wouldn't complain about Microsoft's activity when you link to Wikipedia rather than the author's own page on sparklines.
But it's not just a miniature graph line. That is a misconception. If you tried miniaturizing graphs with all the axes information etc., they don't become any easier to interpret. They just become smaller.
A Sparkline has special features, like a dot at the endpoint, and a number representing its value (some also display max and min, which gives you an idea of spread). Looking at a Sparkline immediately gives one a sense of the trends and magnitudes in the graph. You cannot imagine how incredibly useful Sparklines are for visualizing the trend of thousands of dynamic trajectories in engineering. Graphs are good if you need to extract detailed information on a few variables, but when you want to see how a dynamic system with 240 variables is evolving, Sparklines can give you that information in 3-4 printed pages. That's how information dense they are.
Sparklines on PC have existed since the 1990s for financial, memory management, cpu graphing, calculators and medical statistics. They even go back farther in the field statistics and physics itself. Neither Microsoft, nor Tufte have invented anything here.
I design sophistcated financial applications for a living, so I know exactly how valuable basic trend indication can be. The point of my post was to highlight that this idea is:
a) not at all novel or original
b) like trying to patent writing
c) did not in any way originate with Tufte
Great idea, not Tufte's, in no way Microsofts, laughable on it's face.
-rt
I have been hearing about the first to apply rule. If patent reform includes such a rule change these new patent applications to inventions by others will have beat the owners of ideas in the race to patent, plus it allows free grab of anything left unpatented.
Microsoft patented the use of sparklines as a visualization for a single cell in a grid. In the US patent system, that's night and day different. They recognise Edward Tufte on their website for his invention of the sparkline: "For Excel 2010 we've implemented sparklines, "intense, simple, word-sized graphics", as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence."
If they would patent the sparkline they would have no claim because of broadly published prior art, under 35 U.S.C. 301: "Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent. If the person explains in writing the pertinency and manner of applying such prior art to at least one claim of the patent, the citation of such prior art and the explanation thereof will become a part of the official file of the patent. At the written request of the person citing the prior art, his or her identity will be excluded from the patent file and kept confidential."
Speaking from an information visualisation perspective Microsoft badly implemented sparklines in excel.
Well, I've just looked at it, and yes, it is just a miniature graph. Make all the claims you like, but it is just a graph sized to fit with the surrounding objects. Wow, it has a dot at the end-point (like of course, every other graph I've seen, although the dot is in the example I saw a different colour, wow!), and some also display a max and min value, funnily enough like most normal graphs. How does looking at a sparkline give you any more of a sense of a trend than any other similar traditional line graph. Answer: it doesn't. What it does do is occupy less space. Those of us who have had to embed graphs in documents, have used very similar techniques, but didn't bother to declare it a wondrous new technology.
To summarise: it's a small graph with certain characteristics.
He is not suing Microsoft, and has done absolutely nothing wrong, And your post is a simple troll.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
without so much as a by-your-leave from Tufte
The summary seems to be implying that Tufte should have asked Microsoft for their permission before allowing them to rip him off. This seems somewhat harsh on the poor guy.
First of all, fuck you and your condescending attitude.
Patents are unreadable by an expert in the field they apply to. I have 15 years experience in IT, as a developer and sysadmin, plus a formal education in a technical field, and I can't understand patents that apply to the work I do. I can not. I might just be stupid, but I can't help notice that most of my peers can't read patents either.
Yet I can get sued should I publish Free software that is infringing on something I can't read.
And here you are, patronising people for not understanding that patent, while the damn things are made unreadable *on fucking purpose* because it's advantageous to the patent holder since it makes it easier to trick east Texan rednecks into awarding them billions for nothing.
Sure, the patent application may not go through, most likely because of the non-obvious/inventive step requirement (even if you find something looking like prior art, it may not look like it to a lawyer).
It doesn't make the (american) patent system any less stupid though:
Microsoft obviously thought the chances were good enough (> 0%) to spend some money filing a patent. It would (almost) be business malpractice if they didn't. Similar patents have been granted before (progress bars, one click shopping etc) and M$ would get a significant advantage if the patent was allowed (great marketing feature and by preventing interoperability of spreadsheets once again).
As long as design/software patents are allowed, you have to live with the consequences. Next time, vote on someone who cares.
Sparklines "are meant to be embedded into what they are describing" quote http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2009/07/17/sparklines-in-excel.aspx
How can a patent be granted on embedding them in a grid, when Sparklines were designed to be easily embedded into other contexts. A grid being one such context.
Edward... sparkliness... vampires (MS)... I smell another 'Twilight' promo here.
It's too bad that we're all here talking about the legal issues surrounding Excel's implementation of Sparklines, rather than praising the developers at MS for picking up on this great idea and putting it in the code. Isn't this what is supposed to happen in a free market of ideas?
It's obvious that MS isn't trying to claim authorship of Sparklines per se, since they mention Dr. Tufte's name right up front. Seems to me they're just being aware of a terrific UI idea, and putting it into code. There's not a thing wrong with that, and frankly, it doesn't happen nearly often enough.
The fact is, Sparklines look awesome in Excel, and I'd love to see them in Sharepoint, too, where a lot of dashboard-type information gets displayed. Way to go, Microsoft! It's great to see some outside-the-box thinking; you've beat your open source competitor at his own game.
People who know me know I don't normally take Microsoft's side on IP issues, but if their patent is properly limited in scope and novel in execution then let 'er rip. If the patent claim is trash, well then, OK, throw it out. But we need to make sure we don't discourage this imitation-is-the-sincerest-form-of-flattery style of development. That's how we advance the art.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
I've used sparklines that were updated "automatically" from the values in a database. The software in question tracked the coffee consumption pr. person in the lab, and displayed it using sparklines on a web page (no longer online). The sparkline code was a PHP snippet I found on the net somewhere. There must be plenty of prior art.
Am I really the only person looking at this and thinking 'it's a graph'?
The rest is all visual design and auto-updating.
Big deal. Obvious. Stupid. So they patented it, because they could. Now that they did, they can now threaten more frivolous patent law suits against their competitors when ever its advantageous. So remind me USPTO, Exactly how does this patent help the general public? Never mind the stupid and obvious criteria, but rather how and why should such a patent even exist under the 'defined purpose' that our founding fathers had envisioned/intended?
If only there was a way to show Microsoft's coming Waterloo using just one immediately apparent and arresting graphic.
So what is the argument really about? If these charts are so prevalent, what is Tufte complaining for? As anyone knows who's been following Tufte for as long as I have knows that his real contribution to the field of graphics is his minimalist approach - his crusade to remove the graphics of the world from "chartjunk". His goal is to present the user with the most amount of information using the least amount of features. So, aside from a nifty name, to what exactly is Tufte laying claim? The same could also be asked of Microsoft - are they claiming a specific layout, color combination, or feature set? Or are they just trying to capitalize on the name "Sparklines". If the former, I don't think anyone has a case. If the latter, that does seem fairly reprehensible.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
New Patent! Sparklines ***on the internet***!
I'll make BILLIONS!
Especially since that patent would screw over Office documents like excel with a sparkline being saved as a HTML page...
For my next patent, "Sparklines ***In Open Office***!!!" I tells ya, the opportunities here are endless!
As it was explained to me: Patents aren't written so that they're impossible to read. Patents are written so that they're impossible to misread. The enforceable parts must be written very precisely so that a judge knows exactly what they mean without any guesswork. You can think of the judge as a compiler who needs to have each part of the program described in careful language.
The form of patent applications is generally the same as a century ago. That's necessary since they need to maintain a consistent and interactive structure. That also means that they appear archaic. But that's mostly due to unfamiliarity. Once you learn to read the code, they become straightforward.
Would you expect to read a template class in C++ without ever studying the C++ language? Would you expect to read a medical research paper and understand it completely without studying medicine?
The good news is that reading patents is easier than writing them. I myself am feeling more confident about the first but looking for professional help with the second. Patent It Yourself by David Pressman gives an explanation that will be clear to any computer coder with just a little study.
to be supposed to understand C++ code.
Yet I can be found to be infringing on a patent I don't understand.
So... read this:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20090282325.pdf
It's very clearly patenting the use of sparklines in Excel, with key features being that they autoupdate and can chain sparklines with other sparklines.
There are those who might consider this infringing, but it's certainly not attempting to patent sparklines themselves.
I'm guessing this was patented as a defensive move. There's probably someone out there that has created a 3rd part plugin for Excel that they want to knock down.
How can anyone patent a graph ?
I don't care how small it is, or whether it has axis labels, or what, it's a damned graph (or chart, which ever word you prefer)
No, there is one novel thing he did: Give it a name.
I wonder if he trademarked it and can sue MS over that...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I'm honestly not sure what exactly MS is patenting.
This doesn't look like an attemptt to patent sparkilnes, much as the headline wants to paint it that way (and many commenters seem to be playing along). If it were, the claims would describe how to visualize data as a sparkline; instead, right from the very beginning of claim 1, they take the concept of a sparkline as a given.
So it's not sparklines; its the association of a sparline to data and presentation parametesr in an Excel document that they msut be trying to protect. Is it a bad patent? Maybe; the associations to Excel elements could be obvious. But to assert that every sparkline out there (but not used in an Excel document and integrated with it in the ways the patent describes) is prior art would be incorrect. Since nobody but MS could add this feature to Excel, I doubt there's any prior art. It could be that similar use of sparklines in another spreadsheet package would qualify, unless there's something unique about the way it's done in the Excel format.
There is nothing inherantly wrong with a patent on an invention that depends on / incorporates an element that itself would not be patentable.
Actually, at least one of the uninformed commentators on Tufte's site mentions Latex as including exactly the functionality in question here.
You're right, Slashdot should do a better job of policing everything in these discussions and correcting any and all inaccuracies. Of course, there wouldn't be much left if this were done.
If Microsoft wants to patent their implementation of Sparklines in Excel, that's their business. I've seen plenty of implementations in other applications, including spreadsheets, document editors, etc. Excel is their app and if they want to scare third parties from developing for their platforms with patents, that's fine by me.
I don't use Excel (or other Microsoft crap) so that will just mean more developers will be working on the stuff I use.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes, the patent owner has a time-limited monopoly on the method patented because he/she invented and published it first. Your reinventing it later does not revoke the monopoly status and its associated profits.
Does this not count as prior art?
http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2006/02/05/in-cell-charting/
It's been proven time and again that Slashdot cannot get patent stories right.
http://www.bissantz.de/sparklines/ Done for Microsoft office Feb. 2005 See also http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001OR&topic_id=1 Also the size of graphics is not implicitly small but can and could have been any size and automated by scripts the way Nicolas Bissantz did in '05
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
And my point is, how am I supposed to know he "invented" (for broad values of "invented") the damn thing if the damn thing is unreadable?