After seven years in court, palmOne has won a suit by Xerox over its Graffiti handwriting system.
For the past seven years, various generations of Palm, Inc. have been fighting a lawsuit brought by Xerox over alleged patent infringement in the Palm OS's Graffiti handwriting recognition system. Now, a US district court judge has issued a summary judgement against Xerox invalidating the patent, putting Graffiti in the clear.
Ironically, last year Palm (now palmOne) announced that it was dropping Graffiti in favor of Graffiti 2, based on the multi-stroke Jot handwriting system. Although at the time it down-played the importance of the Xerox lawsuit at the time, the company did acknowledge that the Xerox case was the impetus for investigating alternative handwriting systems. palmOne and PalmSource made it clear, however, that regardless of the outcome of the case they were going forward with Graffiti 2 and leaving Graffiti 1 behind.
The lawsuit began back in 1997, when Xerox sued Palm, Inc., then a division of 3Com, claiming that the Graffiti handwriting system infringed on their patent for Unistrokes, another handwriting recognition alphabet that did not resemble Graffiti in any way save that both emphasized the simplicity of a single pen stroke for every character. Palm was later spun off from 3Com, and when Palm spun off PalmSource and renamed itself palmOne last fall it inherited liability for the case. The patent in question, US Patent 5,596,656, was awarded on 21 January 1997 based on earlier work.
The US district court originally ruled in 2001 that the Graffiti system did infringe on the Xerox patent,which applied to any single-stroke-based handwriting recognition system. Palm appealed the case, and the US Court of Appeal in the case ruled in 2003 that Graffiti was indeed covered by the patent but the district court should reexamine whether the patent was over-broad in the first place, and therefore invalid. Now, the district court has ruled that the patent is indeed over-broad and invalid, thus making palmOne and 3Com not liable for any damages beyond the legal costs already paid.
The long-term impact for the platform is still unclear. palmOne and PalmSource stated last year that they would not be going back to Graffiti, although in so doing they angered many long-time users and Graffiti users. Should PalmSource or palmOne choose to alter their plans as a result of this ruling, possibilities include bundling both handwriting systems on future handhelds or a hybrid version that supports both character sets. Neither company has made any comment on the matter aside from being pleased by the ruling, however, and a future for the original Graffiti (save through 3rd party utilities) is by no means assured.
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