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."

Comments

Opposing patents

[StreetStealth]

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?

Re:Opposing patents

[mcgrew]

He doesn't have custody; his parents do and the lawyer's not theirs, he's her ex's criminal attorney. They usually don't award custody of the kids to someone who goes to prison for a violent felony, and he beat Amy so badly she had to get reconstructive surgery. The guy's a real wacko from what I understand, a year or so he was on the front page of the SJ-R for a high speed chase through downtown where he hit a few cars, including police cars, almost ran over some cops, when they finally arrested him he had a loaded gun (felons can't have guns, that's another felony), drugs, and was drunk. IINM he's in prison again for that one. IMO he belongs there.

She called me after her court date, she has until Monday now. It looks like she's still going to jail, and it looks to me like her boyfriend wants her there. A few days ago he was trying to get her to skip her court date (!!!) and he'd pay the fine today at 4:00 when he got paid. I and others told her that was incredibly stupid, instead of six days she'd be a month or more. So her layer got an extention until Monday, now the BF says that after paying the rent he doesn't have the money.

I told her to get a job and out of his house.

PS: Thank you!

Re:A Few Points

[Grond]

A quick search shows: http://sparkline.org/ which on their sf page have a release dated 2004-11-09

It doesn't anticipate any of the claims, but it may help in an obviousness analysis. Specifically, it doesn't automatically update the sparkline if the data changes and it doesn't automatically adjust the horizontal proportion of the sparkline (at least that I could tell the width is set explicitly by the programmer).

Of course, this is to be expected since it's for the web and not a spreadsheet. I suspect a good obviousness argument could come from it though: This is a static sparkline graphing tool. Other static graphing tools have been incorporated into spreadsheets as dynamically updating charts. It would be obvious to add this one new kind of chart to a spreadsheet, especially given that their use on a computer has already been demonstrated.

Normal sparklines are vertically proportional to the surrounding text but not horizontally proportional because, apart from the width of the page, free flowing text has no natural notion of width. A spreadsheet, on the other hand, is made up of discrete cells, so it would be obvious to make the sparkline's width proportional to the width of one or more cells.

I fully expect that those arguments, or something very much like them, will be made by the patent examiner.

Re:A Few Points

[dbIII]

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.

The wikipedia article lists several, but for all I know they may have appeared there after your post.
As for the patent being of restricted use that is true but ultimately somewhat petty. It is like appending "on a plane" onto a mention of anything.

Do you know who Tufte is?

[Kupfernigk]

Obviously not. If you did you would know he always credits his sources in depth and explains the historical development of his thinking. He often draws out features of graphical presentation of data and gives them simplifying names to provide a framework, but he does not claim originality.

He is not suing Microsoft, and has done absolutely nothing wrong, And your post is a simple troll.

Re:A Few Points

[Anonymous Coward]

There is something very wrong with your argument from a logical perspective. It is not about dissecting the claim as you call it it is about generalizing the claim that speadsheeds are already automaticaly updating graphs that is sernanly true and as sparklines are just graphs the claim holds also for sparklines so there is not much left to patend anyway. To recap it is not looking at just a part of the claim it is looking at a statement that is true for sparklines as it is true for all graphs in a spreadsheed

Re:Why are you surprised?

[smitty777]

You all need to read the patent. Microsoft is not trying to patent the graphics, layout, colors, etc. What they are claiming is the specific implementation (i.e., the computer component) that ties together the graphic with the data set. TF(P) states:

  "A computer-implemented method, comprising: associating a sparkline with a location in a document to provide a visual representation of one or more data values included in the document"

Yes, Tufte did come up with a nifty name, and yes MS is using that name to sell their stuff (without giving Tufte credit). But, as many have already mentioned on this thread, graphs very similar to these have been around for quite some time.