After hearing about the court ruling that Palm infringed on Xerox’s handwriting recognition patent, I decided to search through Ye Olde Patent Database to see what Palm has for leverage. As the higher-ups are always fond of telling me when I start spouting my philosophical views about software patents, patents are like chits that companies trade off with each other, so you have to get some to counter your competition’s claims of infringement (see Xerox vs HP). If Palm had had a patent to use against Xerox, I assume they would have pulled it out by now. The problem is, Xerox doesn’t actually compete with Palm, so Palm can’t say “well, your PDA uses xyz which infringes on our patent for abc.” Instead, Xerox is cashing in on something they happened to have patented but do not use commercially. Well, they missed the boat with GUIs (Apple) and who knows what else, so this is a long awaited win for their research teams (ie PARC).

Palm owns a few patents on methods for synchronizing computer systems, their “cradle with combined status indicator light and stylus holder” (I’m looking at mine right now) is patented, their “method for securely transmitting a message between a wireless client and a proxy server” could be useful against other wireless device companies, an early patent is for their original backlight dispay, and it appears that the way a user moves the antenna to the up position on a Palm VII in order to start wireless connectivity is patented. One broad patent they have covers the separate alpha and numeric input areas on the Palm. It is phrased generically enough to cover any handwriting recognition areas that are designed to recognize specific character sets. But there isn’t anything useful against Xerox, which has pretty much stuck to printers and scanners. (Note: the suit was also filed against Palm’s former parent, 3Com whose 572 patents I assume were also no help.) (Disclaimer: I am not a patent attorney, nor do I play one on TV. But I did just break a company rule against not looking at patents in case I accidentally infringe one in the future. Whoops.)