Microsoft Applies For Patent On Tufte's Sparklines 175
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."
It's not a patent for Sparklines themselves (Score:5, Informative)
A comment on the blog post [harvard.edu] 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.
Specifically... (Score:3, Informative)
The most general claim of the patent, claim number 1, is:
A Few Points (Score:5, Informative)
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 [uspto.gov] 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.
They give him credit on a MS Blog Page (Score:3, Informative)
Over on the Microsoft Excel Team Blog [msdn.com] they even give Edward Tufte credit as the inventor of these sparklines.
Re:Why are you surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
They're already published and in use, therefore not patentable.... if only the patent office would follow their own damn rules about such things!
Re:Opposing patents (Score:5, Informative)
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?
I am not an attorney (I'm an academic) and this is not legal advice. If you ever find yourself in a situation like this you should consult a competent patent attorney in your jurisdiction. To be clear, when I use the word 'you' in this post I mean the generic 'you,' not you personally.
Here's the basic flowchart. Has the other party filed an application or received a patent? If they've already received a patent, then your primary option is to put the patent into reexamination. To do this requires evidence of a substantial new question of patentability (i.e., something new the examiner or the courts haven't looked at yet) and the payment of a fee. You can either put it into ex parte reexamination, where you submit your evidence and the patent office takes it from there, or you can put it into inter partes reexamination, where the patent office holds a sort of mini trial with you arguing against the patent's validity and the patent owner arguing for it.
If the patent holder is actually demanding a license, threatening a lawsuit, etc, then you may also have the option of filing what's called a declaratory judgment lawsuit where you ask a court to determine whether the patent is valid or not.
If things are still at the application stage, your options are much more limited. You can submit prior art to the patent office, or, in the rare circumstance that you also have a pending patent application on the same invention, then the patent office may declare what's called an interference and try to figure out who invented the claimed invention first.
Re:A Few Points (Score:3, Informative)
The examiner will almost certainly come back with multiple rejections based on obviousness
You have such faith in the Federal Gov't. I wish I were still as naive as you.
This is not naïveté, this is based on personal experience and empirical research. Virtually no patent applications sail through completely unopposed, especially not applications--like this one--that claim combinations of known prior art elements whose combination behaves in a predictable way.
Furthermore, obviousness is probably the most common basis for rejection, especially in a case like this, where the broadest claim is basically 'sparklines in a spreadsheet.' Sparklines are prior art, spreadsheets are prior art, so it's at least arguable that the combination is obvious, especially given that sparklines are really just a special type of chart, which are of course a common and well known spreadsheet feature.
Re:I'm trying to figure out who's more ridiculous. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Obvious bad patent (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, yes, it *is* a legal requirement that MS not claim to invent what they haven't invented. Unfortunately, this is never enforced with the applicable punishment. (Rarely against individuals. I've never heard of it being enforced against a company.)
Re:A Few Points (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/archives/2006/02/05/in-cell-charting/ [dailydoseofexcel.com] https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7603152763857688635&postID=4147846911463078558&pli=1 [blogger.com] Note especially comments by Bob Phillips and jon Peltier, in addition to the post by Fabrice on starting in 2005.
Plus, I'm not sure why you emphasize open source implementations that predate it. Did you really mean to imply that if I had a closed source implementation that predated it, it would not be prior art ?
Re:Opposing patents (Score:4, Informative)
Please stop thinking in a FOSS mind frame. In our world, someone asks a question and if we're experienced in that field we don't mind helping out. In the law world, they just lol'd at you (just like every patent attorney who actually read your post) and are currently waiting for you to swipe your credit card details. Now ... Armchair Patent Attorneys ... now that's another matter. I'm sure they're willing to provide an abundance of information.
I'm taking the patent bar in a month and the state bar in three. I'm currently an academic, so naturally part of my job is teaching people about the law, but I'm not going to stop doing so if I'm admitted to the bar. In fact, the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility state that lawyers should help to educate the public about the law (note: they aren't required to, but they should).
Furthermore, there are patent attorneys that have made helpful comments on Slashdot over the years, which stands in direct contradiction to your claim.
Similarly, one of the people I work with is an experienced patent attorney and distinguished law professor. We offered to be the subject of a Slashdot interview about patents, particularly software patents. We felt we'd be a good match since he graduated from MIT and I have bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science. Slashdot didn't take us up on the offer, but at least we tried.
And finally I'll just point out that there are, of course, far more armchair patent attorneys than patent attorneys on Slashdot, so statistically it's hardly surprising that most comments, helpful or otherwise, come from non-experts. It would actually be pretty incredible if every patent-related post or comment on Slashdot was met by a host of patent attorneys chiming in on the issue.
Re:A Few Points (Score:3, Informative)
The examiner will almost certainly come back with multiple rejections based on obviousness [....]
You're saying this about the patent system that approved the patents on swinging on a swing and using a laser pointer as a cat toy?
I said rejections would be made, not that Microsoft wouldn't be able to overcome them with arguments or amendments. And a quick check shows that rejections were filed in both cases*. Both patents have since been abandoned for failure to pay the maintenance fees, by the way.
* Technically, the record shows that one and two office actions were filed, respectively. Each office action contained one or more rejections, and it's common for them to contain several. The patents are old enough that the complete record is not available on PAIR, so all I can say for certain is that there were rejections filed.
Microsoft didn't patent the sparkline itself (Score:3, Informative)
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 [msdn.com] 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.
Re:Why are you surprised? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why are you surprised? (Score:3, Informative)
This appears to be a specific implementation of sparklines in an Excel spreadsheet, not sparklines in general. This blog [dailydoseofexcel.com] talks about this specific implementation (sparklines in Excel) in 2006. This comment on that blog [dailydoseofexcel.com] says that there are three current commercial implementations.
There's even a Sourceforge project for Sparklines in Excel [sourceforge.net], but it appears to have first published in early 2009.
I've done it... (Score:5, Informative)
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.