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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.
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?
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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.
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.
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Over on the Microsoft Excel Team Blog they even give Edward Tufte credit as the inventor of these sparklines.
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They're already published and in use, therefore not patentable.... if only the patent office would follow their own damn rules about such things!
They should patent Tourette instead, so maybe the rest of the world stop getting its symptoms every time they make a move.
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.
It's a little too early to fault the USPTO, since Microsoft as only applied for the patent, it hasn't been granted yet.
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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.
They are not. In addition to Tufte, they've been used since 70ties (??) in Neuroscience and Physiology to describe currents (i.e. http://jp.physoc.org/content/574/2/415/F7.large.jpg
He is not suing Microsoft, and has done absolutely nothing wrong, And your post is a simple troll.
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This appears to be a specific implementation of sparklines in an Excel spreadsheet, not sparklines in general. This blog talks about this specific implementation (sparklines in Excel) in 2006. This comment on that blog says that there are three current commercial implementations.
There's even a Sourceforge project for Sparklines in Excel, but it appears to have first published in early 2009.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
"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!
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)