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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."
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.
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.
Am I really the only person looking at this and thinking 'it's a graph'?
The rest is all visual design and auto-updating.