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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."
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.
Ok, so if I have to push a button to update it, it's not covered? If I don't embed it but, say, just have an external application retrieve data from a spreadsheet, it's not covered?
Yes, I'm hanging on technicalities. But when you look at it closely, the whole software patent BS is about technicalities and not much more. We're talking about (usually) so obvious applications that a 5 year old wouldn't only get the idea but actually say "duh" when you present it to him.
Maybe that would be a good metric. The patent clerc should tell his 5 year old about the idea. If he says "duh", it's not patentable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How are Sparklines even patentable? They're just a graph, scaled down. I don't even see an innovation here, either my Microsoft or Tufte.
I hate printers.
Sorry, but taking an existing invention and just taking on "in Excel" or "using a computer" does not make it a new invention. That seems to be the way the USPTO treats those magic words, though.
Well, golly, I've got a very small chart in a spreadsheet. And you're suggesting that I could dynamically update that chart? Wow! I would never have thought of that! Truly a breakthrough that must have taken years of research and is totally worth a patent.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
It's not just "stupid and obvious", there is plenty of prior art, and it follows from standard engineering principles.
Point is, it's not an attempt on something already claimed by someone.
Yes, it is. If sparklines are public domain and updating graphs dynamically is public domain, then so is the (obvious) combination. The technique belongs to all of us.
So, Microsoft isn't just stealing from another inventor here, they are stealing from all of us, which is even worse.
That's pretty interesting. If I remember correctly, there is a LaTeX package for creating sparklines, it uses data that can be embedded in the document, it takes additional parameters that influence the look of the sparkline, and if you change the data a re-run latex, the sparkline changes to reflect the new data, while preserving the look given by the additional parameters. Add to it a system that watches your file and rerun latex every time to see a change in order to generate a preview (I believe I have seen at least one such editor), and it seems to me exactly like what they are describing. I don't quite understand what they mean by "matrix of points proportional to the associated location in the document". If that is the only difference, it really seems too little to deserve a patent.
AccountKiller
updating a graph is not patentable, spreadsheets already do it.
It's a legal rule that in an obviousness analysis you have to consider the claims as a whole. You can't dissect the claims into individual, obvious elements. It's the combination of all of the elements that must be found obvious.
I'm not saying that dynamically updating sparklines in a spreadsheet isn't obvious, just that the argument you made isn't a legally valid one.
So they patent putting it in a single cell? How obvious is that? Putting something else than text in a cell? No matter what, it's a graph, it's line art, an image, images and lines have been rendered by computers for decades, no matter if it's in a cell of a spread sheet or in a window or in whatever else, no matter if the image is synchronized with some numbers from somewhere else and what not, I fail to see any innovation at all, it's just plotting of a graph based on numbers.
Am I really the only person looking at this and thinking 'it's a graph'?
The rest is all visual design and auto-updating.