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.

Comments

Excellent!

[AKAImBatman]

A perfect example of how the system should work. The patent office doesn't need a reform, it needs to simply do a better job of following its own rules. Organizations like PubPat are a good thing, because they add another layer of checking (i.e. public responsibility) to the patent process.

It may surprise many to know that patent officers are often promoted on how many patents they reject, not how many they approve. Thus it is in their interest to reject any applications with even the slightest possibility of being invalid. Yet it seems that ridiculous patents make it through anyway. How does this happen?

The answer lies in the patent lawyers who draw up the papers. What they'll do, is that they'll draw up revision after revision of the idea until the patent office is confused enough to grant it. (Or perhaps they lucked upon a new patent officer.) That's why most of these patents seem so vague. The applicants are making sure that there's no way someone who doesn't have a very thorough education in the field of the patent could understand that the idea is unpatentable. Thus the idea passes through the process and must be challenged in court or via reexamination later.

Would a patent help?

[tkrotchko]

Seems to me a patent would have run out by now.

If you look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_file_system#Histo ry

You'll see a couple landmarks:

FAT12 - 1980
FAT16 - 1983
VFAT - 1995
FAT32 - 1997

But really, the FAT file system is 24 years old at this point. How can you patent something you did 24 years ago and you've not complained about it in all that time?

Not excellent

[Moderation abuser]

Definitely *not* an example of how it should work. You have an external organisation doing the job that the patent office itself should be doing. That's a failure in need of reform. Perhaps if business processes and software were not patentable, the patent office might have more resources to devote to patents which are worthy of being granted.