Prior art on Microsoft patents asserted against Barnes & Noble and Motorola

Question

I was wondering whether there was sufficient prior art for some of the patents that Microsoft is using in (what I consider) strong-arming Android manufacturers? Most of those seem to have been resolved under NDA, but here's some information from the Barnes & Noble case and the just-completed Motorola case in Germany, #US7411582

• #US6,891,551: “Selection handles in editing electronic documents.” Issued May 10, 2005
• #US5,778,372: “Remote retrieval and display management of electronic document with incorporated images.” Issued July 7, 1998.
• #US6,957,233: “Method and apparatus for capturing and rendering annotations for non-modifiable electronic content.” Issued Oct. 18, 2005.
• #US7,411,582: "Soft input panel system and method." Issue date: Aug 12, 2008

Answer 1

It would appear that any virtual keyboard would qualify under #7,411,582: "Soft input panel system and method.", and as the wikipedia article shows, even the general idea of intelligent work surfaces has been around since at least 1993, although if Microsoft's version is an improvement on that, it will not be relevant.

Answer 2

It looks to me like the open-source xvkbd was performing precisely this function in 2000 - four years before the Microsoft #7,411,582 was submitted. However, it would only serve as prior art if it was usable on a touch surface? Does a touch-screen based X windows display running some UNIXy operating system count for this? I'm sure someone can show this existed before, and I would not be surprised if the touch-screen display was paired with precisely this sort of keyboard.

If you look at the xvkbd project's Changelog, you will see version 2.5, which was released October 12, 2002, added a feature they call "Quick Modifier". In the description of the feature in the main part of the site the author describes this as a feature that "... may be useful especially for machines with touch panels such as PDAs."

Answer 3

If the term "selection handles" covers what is sometimes called a "bounding box", then there is a lot of prior art for #6,891,551. Software has had resizable selection mechanisms for ages. Image and audio editors frequently have resizable selection boxes. I specifically remember an audio player for BeOS (this was back in the mid/late 90's) that used multiple adjustable selection handles to select a portion of an audio track to play.