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PUBPAT Challenges Microsoft's FAT Patent
An anonymous reader writes "The Public Patent Foundation filed a formal request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office today to revoke Microsoft Corporation's patent on the FAT File System, touted by Microsoft as being 'the ubiquitous format used for interchange of media between computers, and, since the advent of inexpensive, removable flash memory, also between digital devices.' In its filing, PUBPAT submitted previously unseen prior art showing the patent, which issued in November 1996 and is not otherwise due to expire until 2013, was obvious and, as such, should have never been granted."
Was not FAT12 (DOS 2.0) not actually an extension of the CP/M file system? Does not ProDOS, MFS HFS and all most all the other early file systems behave in similar fashions? FAT16 was merely a hacked to 2gb extension of the orignal 32mb limited FS. a Patent on FAT makes NO sense.
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sure, NTFS is the file system of choice for newer windows boxes. but there are still plenty of other devices using the FAT system, such as digital cameras, mp3 players, personal video recorders, etc. still plenty of money to be made.
I remember file systems based around the ideas of FAT at least back to the Apple II+. And if I'm not mistaken, Apple's literature referred to it as "FAT" (I wish now I hadn't given all that old stuff away a few years ago).
I don't see how this patent could possibly be held valid...well...wait a minute...this is the US Patent Office we're talking about here. We should be afraid.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
If you go to their "Activities" page and read the request itself, they are talking about:
5,579,517
which covers the "long file names" stuff Windows 95 introduced, and they site two patents:
5,307,494 to Yasumatsu et al., and
5,367,671 to Feigenbaum et al.
as new prior art.
That's trademark, not copyright.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
These patents are not for the FAT file system. IANAL. The Microsoft one is for long file name support that goes on top of the FAT file system. The "prior art" one (5307494) describes some sort of long file name support augmenting a specific file system, but does not state which file system from what I can tell.
Um, this isn't about FAT12 or FAT16, it's about specific extensions added for DOS style file name for FAT32. Basically the patent covers the means of embedding the DOS style handle into the FS block data in such a way as to allow backwards compatability while still allowing apps that use the correct API to get the real long file name. For more info see this wikipedia article. The most damning thing to MS is that they released beta code for Win95 more than 2 years before filing the first of the patents. Patent law clearly states that you have no more than 364 days after first publicly demonstrating a device or idea to patent it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
From what I understand, the patent is on a way of storing long filenames with the FAT filesystem. This first came out with Windows 95 and is implemented in a backward compatible manner.
Basically the issue is this... in FAT there are a fixed number of bytes to each file entry in the directory. It is only enough for 8+3 character filename. They could not just expand on this data structure because it would not be backward compatible. What they realized is that if you created a filename with the system, hidden and some other attributes set, the old versions of dos would never display the filename. So what they do to store a long filename is create multiple file entries each storing a few bytes of the long filename plus some additional data to piece it together. Basically in a old version of dos, these extra file entries would never be displayed but in windows 95 or newer, it would read and maintain both the short filename entry and the long filename entries.
Their specific implementation however might not be challengable, seeing as how they DID invent it. There's a chance however since IIRC patent law gives you only 1 year after public introduction to patent said invention or you lose the right to patent it. The problem then becomes a game of dates and when it was "public" (do wide spread betas count? It WAS indevelopment for 4 years), and when did they submit the patent.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Even the Commodore 64 / 1541 had "long" filenames, at least compared to FAT. Not 256 chars, like most *nix systems, but 14 chars, which is enough for most uses. If filenames get much longer than that, they take too long to type, and you would need grep to find the right file anyway.
No, it was not a hardware limitation, just as the Cobol Y2k problem was not a hardware limitation. Just a stupid design.
a) Using a lookup table (to convert betwen long and short)
b) Using a hashing algorithm (to create short from long).
Its pretty obvious that these are entirely novel solutions to a unique problem, and are nothing to do with the use of hashing algorithms (eg during WWII) or lookup tables (eg civilisations prior to the ancient greeks)
The truth is, these absolutely must be novel, because ...[need more coffee]
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