Xerox Patent Case Against Palm Sent To Lower Court

Xerox Corp. said a federal appeals court Monday overturned a lower court's dismissal of a patent infringement suit brought by the office equipment maker against handheld computer company Palm Inc.

Separately, Palm said that court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in Washington, also rejected a motion for summary judgment brought by Xerox in the matter, related to patented handwriting recognition technology which Xerox claims Palm violates in its personal digital assistants.

The suit, filed in 1997 in U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York, alleged Palm's software for recognizing single stroke motions as characters, called Graffiti, infringed a Xerox patent for a technology called Unistrokes.

In June 2000, a federal judge in Rochester, N.Y., dismissed the suit, saying that the Palm software did not use the same recognition patterns as Xerox's software did.

The Federal Appeals Circuit has now reversed that decision, saying the judge misinterpreted how and where the symbols must be written to be recognized by the computer, Xerox said.

The case will continue in the lower court. Both companies, in separate releases, reiterated their convictions.

"Palm and (former Palm parent) 3Com now have lost two rounds in their effort to avoid the patent," said Christina Clayton, Xerox general counsel. "Now the Court of Appeals has reversed a finding of no infringement and defined the use of Graffiti in the Palm devices clearly within the scope of the Xerox claims."

Countered Palm's CEO: "Palm continues to believe that the Graffiti software does not infringe the patent and that Palm has other defenses supporting its stance. Palm intends to continue to vigorously defend itself."

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