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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."
I for one am sick of this patenting frenzy. What will they do when there is nothing left to patent? ...oh, hold on, i know - they'll start suing.
I don't mean to play devil's advocate, but is it ok to challenge patents just because they become standards?
Microsoft has annouced it's purchase of United States Patent and Trademark Office.....SCO has been issued a patent for unix....the RIAA has been issued a patent for sound .....the MPAA has been issued a patent for light.....
But doesn't this just validate that the patent system albeit a little broken generally works.
Surely everyone has to realise that patent officers can't be geniuses in their respective fields, because the genuieses are off inventing and discovering things.
Hence the onus should be on making it easy to revoke granted patents the minute prior art is discovered. Otherwise it could take patent officers years to validate each patent.
Funtage Factor: Purple
I don't mean to play devil's advocate, but is it ok to challenge patents just because they become standards?
If they were standards before they were patented, then yeah - I would say that's grounds for challenging them.
If they were a stealth patent on an idea that was common knowledge at the time (and I'm thinking especially of things that just weren't practical due to lack of CPU power that are blindingly obvious as well) then yeah, definitely.
Anyway, all the devil's advocates are on loan to SCO at the moment, raking in megabucks from the warchest.
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.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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Microsoft's patent on SUGAR and PROTEIN also being reviewed after a mysterious figure known only as 'god' claimed to invent them...
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
It has been quite frustrating to see companies not bother to take these steps. Corporations with significant IP portfolios tend to let it slide knowing that they can just exchange usage of their own silly patent rights if there was ever friction. In the end only the new players (aka innovators!) are victims.
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.
Microsoft has actively participated in various forums to get the world hooked on FAT. Now they're wanting to charge for it.... Part of how they got there was by exerting their power over the desktops (which smells of anti-trust). For example FAT is part of the SmartMedia spec and has got incorporated into SmartMedia cards and hence the peripherals. I bet Microsoft would have refused to get involved with a non-FAT file system and essentiually the camera etc vendors had to choose between some other standard and being able to hook their cameras to Windows PCs.
Now there are a lot of other flash file systems out there that work with SmartMedia cards etc, but they are not supported by MS and never will be.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's called Science.
Here's how it works.
You discover something. To let everyone know about it, you write a paper, and you send it off to a journal. That Journal has other experts in the field read what you've done. If they like it, they tell everyone else about it by printing it up in this little book. If they don't, they tell you to a) revise it, or b) go away.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure thats what you're looking for.
Well, there was this guy named Einstein, ever heard of him? ;)
Einstein: What is it you would like to patent? ... *ruffles through the pages, knocks Smith unconscious, and runs off with the papers*
Smith: I call it Smith's Theory of Relativity.
Einstein:
Nyo nyo, the Neko Boy has spoken.
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.
Scary: That's patent worthy.
Scarier: There were three prior patents covering the technique...
Before, the patent (on browser plugins) being challenged belonged to an individual who was suing Microsoft and even managed to get an injunction (can't remember whether they actually ordered Microsoft to pay or not).
That patent was quickly challenged and nullified. While the w3c and other groups initiated the challenge, I think the reason the patent was nullified was that it belonged to someone who was being used to (successfully) target Microsoft.
Now the patent being challenged belongs to Microsoft, and is being challenged by some small-time nobody (as far as Big Business is concerned).
My prediction is that either the challenge itself will be rejected, or the patent office will "review" the patent and find it "valid". Not because of any merits the patent may have, but because of who owns it. The guys running the patent office know who butters their bread, and it ain't organizations like PUBPAT.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Microsoft's 'FAT' patents do not patent FAT... specifically, they patent the VFAT extensions to FAT. And, as was previously mentioned on slashdot, there's much prior art to using long file names on FAT as well.
So don't call them 'FAT' patents, because they aren't. Call them VFAT patents. Or call them by their names, which also makes it obvious.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think patents should be treated the same way as copyright - if you don't enforce it, you obviously don't want it. Why is Microsoft going to enforce FAT patents now? If they'd enforced them earlier, noone would have used FAT, they'd have found something else to use.
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
The microsoft patents aren't about all of the FAT file system. Rather the method of storing short and long file names in the FAT file system.
Interestingly, the request for reexamination is based partly on what Microsoft might do, and has made no attempt to do. Their assertions are that in light of other patents the specific combination of techniques would have been obvious. This strikes me as less than genuine because of how patents are done, particularly in this day in age. If the combination of ideas was so obvious, why didn't the last of the submitted prior art patent it, since they're so skilled they can claim worthy patents when there is significant pressure to claim everything thing concievable at the time of the filing?
But more importantly; in the case of the invention of polyamides, with their logic the claimed invention of one precludes others from claiming the invention of others of similar structure. In light of Nylon, Kevlar is obvious.
This of course is not what happened.
I'm not saying that shouldn't have happened. It's an interesting demand to make of would be inventors, and certainly a considerable demand to make of the patent office. (I guess we know that when they play Stars! 2 they always click the bleeding edge technology box.) But the fact that their line of reasoning isn't followed, really at all, and has many billions, possibly trillions, of dollars in property bet against it doesn't bode well I would think.
Didn't 4DOS support long filenames on top of FAT long before VFAT (Windows 95) did?
I'm pretty sure I remember using 4DOS around the DOS 3.3 to DOS 5.0 days.
My other first post is car post.
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.
If the combination of ideas was so obvious, why didn't the last of the submitted prior art patent it, since they're so skilled they can claim worthy patents when there is significant pressure to claim everything thing concievable at the time of the filing?
Perhaps they didn't patent it because it *was* obvious. The idea that every idea or hack or workaround or anything else that pops into someone's head should be patented is just ridiculous. It doesn't matter if you did something first that nobody else has done. Perhaps nobody else needed to do it. That doesn't make it patent-worthy. Hell, it's getting so that you can't do a damn thing without major financial backing just to try to figure out if you're violating someone, somewhere's, patent. Even if you're not, you'll still need the financial backing to fight off the inevitable lawsuits from all the vague and overbroad patent holders out there that are trying to hustle anyone that tries to create anything these days.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
After companies got burned by people reading their patents and adding inventions that were a shade of obvious, they took the tack of patenting everything and variation they could concieve of. That became the standard, and it predates the patents cited as prior art.
The good and bad of that, I'll leave to wiser people that myself to discuss, but that is the status quo. And that is exactly what PUBPAT is challenging. If they can beat Microsoft with that argument, all the 'little' inventions can/will get overturned too. And I assure you that after many years, PUBPAT will probably be one of the very exceptional David's on a field of Goliaths.
It's a huge change, and in the long run I would predict it would chill innovation in the US, lead to more draconian NDAs & Non-Compete agreements, aid the big guys in consoladating IP to be used against the market more than each other, encourage more secrecy, less patenting, more espionage, and possibly give rise to a preference to patent inventions in other countries. If I had played a lot more Elevator Action, I might see this as a positive development.
Maybe the small inventions like this lead to the larger more important inventions and abstractions. I don't know. Maybe they get brighter less flexible more ambitions people thinking about the true solutions to succeed the collections of hacks. And the publication and protection of those inadaquate hacks, as well as the promissed protection for the imagined invention are a necessary step to the launching pad. Maybe no one does. Maybe the idea of the perfect solution to the mess is an illusion, and we've just got to find the mess that's the best. Maybe we've already found it marveling at the green-ness of grass we might have had.
Microsoft's FAT patent?
I didn't know Microsoft patented Ballmer.
I.e. they're patenting a work around for a stupid shortcoming, for which the only reason nobody else was doing it was that they designed their systems to be more flexible in the first place?
FAT was originally designed in the 1980's, and although long filenames might've been considered, hardware limitations may have made them infeasible at the time. Also, FAT wasn't initially designed by Microsoft; the first version was released with QDOS.
Saying FAT sucks is like saying Minix (the file system) sucks. They're both old, and better file systems supercede them. The only problem is that Microsoft decided to use FAT and extended it for Windows 9x, but that's somewhat understandable from a compatibility standpoint.
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.