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Microsoft FAT Patent Rejected
dkh2 writes "It's being reported other places as well but, there's a very nice story over at Groklaw about efforts by the Public Patent Foundation (PubPat) to get Microsoft's patent on FAT restricted or revoked. Bearing in mind that Microsoft still has right of appeal, The USPTO has rejected Microsofts FAT patent." Our earlier story reported on efforts to overturn this patent.
...such as the following:
U.S. Patent #5,579,517 - Common name space for long and short filenames
U.S. Patent #5,745,902 - Method and system for accessing a file using file names having different file name formats
U.S. Patent #5,758,352 - Common name space for long and short filenames
U.S. Patent #6,286,013 - Method and system for providing a common name space for long and short file names in an operating system
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
FAT itself was never patented. This patent was covering Microsoft's scheme for packing long filenames into the old FAT system in such a way that a short filename (microso~1.txt et al) is persistently perserved for old DOS apps.
Microsoft felt that their innovation of a particular data structure (the same kind of elementary data structure that sophomore CS majors put together all the time) ought to be sufficient to allow them to control who gets to read and write from flash media, and etc., which adopted the format simply because that was the only thing that Windows could be relied upon to understand.
The loss of this patent strikes no blows against the freedom to innovate, believe me.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
[...] They are effectively ruling that Microsoft cannot hold a patent on software they created. [...]
The FAT filesystem itself is not "software", it is a specification. You only talk about "software" when you think of an implementation of FAT, like those found in Windows and the Linux kernel.
Score: i, Imaginary
The patent was rejected based on prior art.
From the patent office rejection statement:
"...patent may not be obtained though the invention is not identically disclosed or described as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains."
Even for this case alone, these guys deserve our support.
Take away all of IBM's bogus patents and it will still hold one of the biggest patent portfolios on the planet. That cannot be said of Microsoft.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.