Palm/3Com Graffiti A Patent Infringement on Xerox 220
Olmy's Jart writes "According to this article on money.cnn.com, a judge has ruled that graffiti, the one stroke shorthand used on Palm Pilots, infringes a Xerox patent for "unistrokes". Really light on details and no links to betters sites, unfortunately." MSNBC also has the story.
quick question (Score:4, Insightful)
hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, Palm was the original, and the only one (along with OS licencees) that offers PDAs that aren't overloaded with pricey color screens, 64mb of memory, and desktop applications. (Well they offer those too, but they still have some good straightforward PDAs). But, with the market crowding, and lots of new Wince apps being written, are we seeing the beginning of the end?
I'd hate to have to buy an overloaded PDA because MS becomes the only game in town...
Patents are the death of IP (Score:3, Insightful)
When are we going to wake up and realize that these artificial constructs originally created to help innovation is actually starting to stifle it? Perhaps people will start to wake up after the recession really starts to hurt. There is going to be a lot of pointing fingers soon.
Re:Patents (Score:2, Insightful)
Shurely there is some prior art [hierogeometry.com] in this area.
In fact the use of simple alphabets [aol.com] possible even predates PDAs.
Also some important books [onlinebible.org] have been written using simple alphabets [geocities.com]
Seriously though, is it the idea of a simple alphabet that Xerox have patented or the exact 'letters' ?
If it's the first then this is just friqin rediculous, if it's just the exact letters then surely Palm can just change a few characters to make it not be covered by the patent.
Re:Patents (Score:3, Insightful)
Read the claims (they're the important bit legally, I believe) - they don't really say anything about the alphabet itself.
Re:Another day, another out of control IP case... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not crazy about software patents, but I'm not going to say that unistrokes weren't innovative either.
Riddle me this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Man out justice system is fucked up. If I ran the world Xerox would have to sue everybody who infringed or nobody. It's unfair to let some people off the hook.
a distinction (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I will. The problem is that people confuse the word "new" with the word "innovation". I don't think something should get a patent just because it solves a problem which didn't exist before. PDAs weren't possible for a lot of hardware reasons until recently. The input method, while clever, is something that any intelligent person could develop if asked to solve the problem. Put ten engineers in isolation chambers and give them two weeks to try to find efficient ways to input data into a handheld computer and 7 of them will come up with something similar to xerox's patent. Ask ten engineers to triple battery life and they wont do it in years. If one of them does, they'll deserve the patent they get. That's innovation. This isn't.
Re:Patents smatents.... it seems very vague (Score:1, Insightful)
if it's the concept of using symbols to input into a device then Apple's Newton might be an example of an earlier device. knowing Apple legal, i would think they secure EVERYTHING they come up with (or buy). though technically the Newton "learned" the user's handwriting, as opposed to the user learning simplified strokes for letters. in that sense Xerox could have secured a "better" way to input data into the device. even so if it is not very specific stuff stolen, that is quite a vague concept to enforce. right?
Re:Riddle me this. (Score:4, Insightful)
Haven't they made their entire empire out of copying the work of others, then using their lawyers to beat the lawsuits off?
But in light of this, it makes
Xerox beats the living daylights out of Palm, and points at Microsoft's licence as proof they own the technology.
Microsoft pays next to nothing for the graffiti patents, and has their butts covered when Palm tries to sue them for using it.
Palm can't sue M$, and they probably can't countersue Xerox. If Xerox manages to kill Palm completely, then M$ just drops Character Recognizer support, and leaves Xerox hanging.
It's brilliant from a stratigic viewpoint. Kind of like giving a little bit of money to a bunch of ignorant Arab terrorists to keep the Russians from taking over a certain country.
additional prior art (Score:2, Insightful)
Palm's input method is actually somewhat different from Xerox's: it is considerably slower, it has some multi-stroke characters, and it requires you to look at the device. The specific Unistroke design in Xerox's input method is actually considerably nicer. Palm knew about the patent and thought that even if it was valid, it wouldn't apply to their input method. The other irony is that writing a simple, trainable multistroke character recognizer isn't hard at all, so Palm could have avoided this issue altogether.
Personally, I think a broad patent shouldn't have been granted, although a narrow patent on the particular Unistrokes alphabet might have been sensible. And I just don't see why Palm's method, which lacks just about all the nice features that Unistrokes have, would infringe. But people who get paid much more than you and me have been working long and hard on this, and that's the outcome.
Please Switch On Brain First (Score:3, Insightful)
If you'd stop the knee-jerk "patents are BAD" reaction and think about the facts before spouting off, you'd realize that this case has been going on since long before the previous ecconomic boom! This isn't about the Tech Slump. Yea, sure -- Xerox is tight for cash, and would love to generate a few $$ off every sale of Palm, Handspring or other devices, but they aren't trying to stiffle competition or put Palm out of business.
Xerox gave us plenty of innovations (e.g., the mouse). This is just one invention they are trying to get credit for.