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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.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Will they do the same with the thousand IBM useless patents?
Oh, I'm sorry, I actually meant they are full of BLOAT, not FAT.
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According to more of the text at groklaw, 70% of those patents challenged, are eventually rejected, just like this one.
Far better than going through the courts once the patent is being defended by nazgul style lawyers is to defeat it on merits with the patent office. Looks like Dan Ravicher is onto something that could do with all our support.
In related news, the US Patent Office also rejected Bill Gates' patent applications for fire and the wheel. ~Knautilus
Guess MS's case was a little THIN. {Ahhh, I feel better now}
Seems to me a patent would have run out by now.
o ry
If you look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT_file_system#Hist
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?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
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.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
i think i should remind everyone, this patent is not on the FAT filesystem itself, but the VFAT extension for long file names. (which, if you know how it works, is nothing innovative)
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
What the zarking faquaad are you talking about? Trolling?
The patent was rejected on obviousness grounds. As in, anybody skilled in the art at the time of invention would have found the invention obvious.
This is pathetic! How this ridiculous license scheme would work with so much of the population obese is beyond me. And the people who would be forced to pay the most, would be the least likely to be able to defend themselves in court without the use of a small crane to leave the house.
" As lawyer, this is ridiculous."
As a developer, this is wonderful.
Software patents are a bad idea. The only people who think differently are lawyers and developers who are mostly under 35 years of age.
All software is derivative.
More to the point, the greatest renassaince in software development came prior to patents of software. It is literally destroying the software industry. Oh, except for MS and IBM.
Really, get a clue.
...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
On a warm summer's evenin' about a patent bound for approvals,
I called up the patent officers; they were too tired to speak.
They just took turns a starin' at the leagal techno babble
'til mind-numbing boredom overtook them, and errors began to creap.
One said, son, I've made a life out of readin' people's patents,
And knowin' what their prior arts were by the way they dotted their i's.
So if you don't mind my sayin', I can see you're really reachin.
For my sons university education, I'll give you some advice.
So I met and wrote his man a cheque, and he looked the zero's that followed.
Then he bummed a cigarette and asked me for a light.
And the night got deathly quiet, and his face lost all expression.
Said, if you're gonna play the game, boy, ya gotta learn to play it right.
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to appeal 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to sue.
You never count your patents when you're sittin' at the judges table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the approval's done.
Now ev'ry patent leecher knows that the secret to survivin'
Is knowin' what to sell off and knowing what to keep.
'cause in ev'ry merger's a winner and ev'ry buyout a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to grab patents while people sleep.
So when he'd finished speakin', he turned back towards the window,
Crushed out his cigarette and faded off to sleep.
And somewhere in the darkness the patent officer, he got even.
But in his final words I found a crooked officer I could keep.
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to appeal 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to sue.
You never count your patents when you're sittin' at the judges table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the approval's done.
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to appeal 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to sue.
You never count your patents when you're sittin' at the judges table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the approval's done.
With nods to Kenny Rogers
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Here's what Ravicher says about this development, "I hope those companies that chose to take a license from Microsoft for the patent negotiated refund clauses so that they can get their money back."
But what about those who have paid SCO for licenses to use Linux? Even if they have negotiated refund clauses, it seems very unlikely that they'll get one.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Software is covered under copyright and should NEVER EVER be patented. It would be like me writing a certain kind of story and then after that no one whould be ever allowed to write that kind of story without paying me a royalty first.
Repeat after me, software should NEVER EVER be granted a patent.
Too bad it got rejected. I was hoping the patent would push people away from FAT. Perhaps just the patent will do the trick, though.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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
Damnit!!! I was really hoping MS would get a patent on FAT, so I could tell my ass it was infringing and draft up a cease & desist .....
Groove Salad -- a nicely chilled plate of ambient grooves and beats.
Stupid troll. They're not saying that nobody should be able to have patents. They're saying you can't patent something that you released to the public over 10 years ago.
Woa....they can reject patents? ;)
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
Since you were modded 'Interesting' and not 'Funny', obviously some mods were suckered into what I hope was your sarcasm. (Sarchasm - the gulf between the writer of sarcastic wit and the one who doesn't get it).
Microsoft can patent stuff - but this particular 'invention' was rejected because it was obvious. Something that's patentable must not only be novel, it must be non-obvious.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I am a little overweight and I have some frieds that eat too much and don't get enough exercise. I know we will all be relieved to hear that we don't have to pay royalties on our cellulite.
Actually even if copyrights vanished overnight, the free software community will be one of the least affected. Of course GPL would no longer mean anything, and much troubles may ensue, but life will probably go on in the community. Now that we are talking about patents, a court decision such as the one you mentioned will hardly do any harm to our community.
Help fight continental drift.
Umm the idea of patenting software is stupid. You can not patent a book, movie, story, sheet music or comic books! Software should be handled under copyright law not patent law.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If file system compatibility really helped THAT much, then BeOS would have owned Linux and Be would be a viable contender today. BeOS' support for Fat32 and NTFS, especially in how easy it was for users to mount them from the desktop, was well above that of the Linux desktops of BeOS' day. When you wanted to mount a drive, a right click on the desktop showed the Fat32 and NTFS partitions as plainly as a BFS partition so the whole process was the same to John Q. Not only that, but BeOS back then also automatically recognized new partitions, something Linux did not and still doesn't seem to do well.
What keeps people loyal to Microsoft in the U.S. is the popularity of its products combined with the variety of games and home software for Windows. Office and Windows have a symbiotic relationship, you take down one, the other goes down eventually, but Windows is more important to Microsoft because the home market provides a solid foundation for Office. Installing a game on Windows is easy for the average home user, but not on Linux.
Game developers don't want to waste their time getting around that. Until a very comprehensive, attractive way to install home software is availible, Linux and other OSS projects will be left behind. The best way for Linux developers to get around this is probably to make a concerted effort to emulate Apple's framework system so that all of the dependencies one needs to have in place are part of the Linux game's ".app directory." Either that or program the games in a combination of C# and C and pray that Mono doesn't die on users.
Maybe it's just my perspective, but interoperability with things like FAT only do so much for the average user. In the long run, it's a lot more complicated than that. If interoperability were the key, then BeOS and MacOS X would have eaten Windows alive a long time ago.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
MSWords -- a patented approach for combining letters of the alphabet into meaningful units that can be "read" (for info on "reading", see MS patent 9997645, "A method for interpreting strings of alphabetic characters")
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."
What we need to do is fight fire with fire. For instance, I should take out a patent on ugly, then sue the holy hell out of Gates and Balmer. At $1 per degree of ugly, I could buy Peru.
The USPTO has rejected a patent? I can't seem to find a site that tells you the weather in hell, because I'm curious to see if it has frozen over.
Even for this case alone, these guys deserve our support.
Don't you mean....
i think i should remind everyone, this patent is not on the FAT files~1 itself, but the VFAT extens~1 for long file names. (which, if you know how it works, is nothing innova~1)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
The FAT long filename kludge gets a lot of flack, but I always thought that is was actually one of the more innovative things that Microsoft did. It did provide some measure of forwards and backwards compatibility during the painful transition from DOS/Win3 filesystems to more modern ones.
However, does anybody seriously think that the promise of a patent reward is what spurred Microsoft to develop this innovation? No way. They came up with it because their desperate need to maintain compatability between their OS generations. They would have done it even if there were no such thing as patents.
Awarding them a patent on this effort now, even if it were valid, serves only to add more barriers to the software marketplace. It is not going to somehow spur them on to create more invaluable innovations in the area of kludging filesystem namespaces.
The problem that this technology solved no longer really exists. Almost nobody is using 11-character-max filesystems today. The only reason to continue to use this technique is so that this filesystem can maintain backwards compatibility with itself, not with older filesystems as originally intended. There is no longer any intrinsic value in a patent on this technology other than to lock out competition.
Because it covers only one method of long filename to short filename conversion.
The scheme patented covered one possible way to convert long filenames into valid dos names by truncating the name and adding ~nn. Windows does this by counting the number of short names, and using this count as the nn value. E.g.
ALongFilename1.txt will have short name ALONGF~1.TXT
ALongFilename2.txt will have short name ALONGF~2.TXT
This is bad because you need to make multiple scans thought the directory to generate the short filenames. There is another patent for a data structure to speed this process up.
You don't have to use this short filename generation method - VxWorks dos FS 2.0 uses a hex hash of the long filename for instance. Thus you'd get this
ALongFilename1.txt will have short name 37f38765.TXT
ALongFilename2 will have short name (more random gibberish).
The idea here is that if you never use Dos, the ugliness of the short filenames doesn't really matter because you only see the long ones.
You could also use the position in the directory for the last two numbers - there are endless possibilities. Provided you link the long filename and short filename correctly - there is a checksum byte in the long filename which links back to the short one, Windows will still be able to see both versions of the filename.
Of course for many applications like digital cameras, 8.3 is still OK.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
So, with the MS Fat Patent rejected, does that mean we will see a new slimmer Windows OS?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Aren't 95% of us North Americans FAT?
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.
U.S. Patent #5,579,517
U.S. Patent #5,745,902
U.S. Patent #5,758,352
U.S. Patent #6,286,013
If Mr. Ravicher is correct and 70% of patents are revoked in re-examination, then at least one of these will survive.
I guess being a Patent attorney gives me a little different view on things like this.
Which useless IBM patent would you prefer they go after? Please cite why you think it is useless, and the benefit if it is overturned. Someone has to invest significant time in an effort to overturn a patent. You want to choose your targets carefully. The reason that this patent was considered important to overturn is not that it was owned by M$, but the potential impact if it wasn't.
It almost seems as if you feel the motivation for overturning individual patents should be to go after organizations, rather than to go after bad patents that could have a significant impact if not overturned.
It's not too hard to connect the dots and see the relationship between OSRM's business model (which benefits from reduced patent risk for Linux) and PUBPAT's agenda, which is to rid the world of bogus patents.
Since this is Slashdot, I don't expect many people will recant their negative comments about OSRM, but I hope most people recognize this as the type of work that OSRM/PUBPAT can do that will have some real positive benefits for Linux, whether you buy OSRM's insurance or not.
I think what my grandparent meant was that, in BeOS, you stick in a new disk and, lo, it is merely a click away. (I never used BeOS for any serious length of time, so I am just guessing.) Here in Linux-land, we cat /proc/partitions, then su, then mount, then become mortal once more, then use, then su again, then umount, then go get a beer. Oh sure, we could just add /dev/sda1 to /etc/fstab, but then what happens when we want to use two USB disks? Or maybe we sometimes use a USB Zip drive? (They use partition 4, for no apparent reason.) Or maybe the USB disk lacks a partition table, so the device we should mount is /dev/sda? It's all stuff we have/had to learn, which is more than just clicking "USB Disk".
Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with it. Just feeding the flames...
<rant>
Of all the stupid things passed off on the computing community, that was one of the most insidious and poorly thought out little "lets break everything" adventures. First we have niche filesystems, designed to not use CLI at all, use it. Flipping brilliant. Not. Then Microsoft has to have it too because they're not too brilliant either, so they break the OS to do it (and yes, it's still broken.) Now Linux, of all things, is all about spaces in filenames. This is a case of imitation being the poorest form of flattery. I wish the Linux community would stand up and say no_more_stupid_filenames and stop using spaces. No financial problem for our LInux community, so we could fix the syntactical problem. I don't hold out much hope for it, but man...
The meat of the problem is that spaces are natural language delimiters, and syntax and parsing are important, even core, parts of CLI and almost all computing languages. To throw them into the same syntactical barrel with letters and numbers was just_plain_stupid.
If I had a "Dumbass Of Coding" award, I'd find the mini-mind that decided to use spaces (I'm guessing it was a Mac guy, but it's just a guess) and engrave them a special plaque.
ThereAreSeveralExcellentAlternatives to-spaces-in-filenames I_can_show_most right.here.without.brain.strain
</rant>
But_I_do_think_long_filenames_are_a_good.idea
:)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I think what my grandparent meant was that, in BeOS, you stick in a new disk and, lo, it is merely a click away. (I never used BeOS for any serious length of time, so I am just guessing.) Here in Linux-land, we cat /proc/partitions, then su, then mount, then become mortal once more, then use, then su again, then umount, then go get a beer.
/dev/sda1. That way the device always shows up in the same place, not matter what order you plug them in.
That all depends on how your distribution is configured. If you're using knoppix, for example, then the drives do automatically pop up on the desktop.
Ask for getting a driver to mount in the same place all the time, the trick I use on my Gentoo desktop is to use a LABEL= entry instead of mounting
I'm not saying linux is perfect, but it has a lot of capabilities people don't know about. Maybe someone will read this and go: Ah! That's the solution to my problem.
Life is too short to proofread.
History lesson.
Microsoft purchased the rights to QDOS from Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for $50K. MS did not steal, nor reverse engineer anything to get MS-DOS. They licensed PC-DOS to IBM and per agreeement with IBM, MS was allowed to sell their own version of DOS as MS-DOS. IBM re-wrote lots of the code due to numerous bugs in MS-DOS, naming their version PC-DOS.
SCP also retained the rights to license MS-DOS as well as long as it was done in conjunction with a computer purchase. You even saw magazines ads to but a copy of DOS bundled with a naked CPU chip.
Tim Patterson of SCP has been know to say he was glad to get $50K from MS for this deal. MS did not inform SCP of their deal with IBM (would you?). Now, although one may feel MS should have been more generous, or SCP should have been wiser, this was at least a legitimate and mutually acceptable arrangement between MS and SCP. Tim later became an MS employee.
IBM is generally considered to have screwed up on this deal as well, letting the fox inside the chicken coup.
See history of MS-DOS or another one for this.
Life is often stranger than imagination.
Because you're an expert on the patents both companies hold, right?
Give me a break.
If you think software patents are stupid, then just say that. Unless you've worked at both companies and know first-hand the differences between the types of patents involved, you do not have the foundation to make your claim.
I'm certain this has consequences for innovation and economic motivation, according to the dire forecasts by intellectual property holding groups (who are clearly experts on the issues involved). Can someone elucidate on what we as a society are giving up by not allowing inventors exclusive rights to their inventions?
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Hmmm... I was under the impression that they used a chained list of bogus directory entry headers to hold space for the long filename characters. Maybe that was an earlier incarnation. I agree a translation file would be a boring way to do it.
AFAIK, the latest builds of Firefox have this bug fixed (so Slashdot should render ok with 1.0 once it's out), but currently (if you want to be nicer to slash's servers) you can change the size instead of refreshing the page to get the correct layout - and if you didn't know, you can do this handily by holding down Ctrl and either pressing '+' followed by a '-', or turning the mouse wheel up and down. Voilá.
Now as to why IE renders Slashdot better, it probably has something to do with this; IE seems to be more tolerant to bad html (whether this is a good thing is a matter of another debate).
Thisisbrilliantwhydon'twejustremovespacesfromevery thingwetypebecauseyouaretoolazytoquoteafilenameorp ressthetabkeyandletthecommandlineinterfacedoitfory ouautomatically.Whydon'twejustremovespacesfromever ythingwedo,maybethereasonwehaven'tisbecausenomatte rwhetheryouareusingcuteunderlinesorcapitalizingeac hwordinthesentence,itisstillhardertoreadandtakemor etimeforthenaturalprocessingofinformationinthebrai ntorecognizethingsquickly.Iforonejustthinkyouarela zyorreallysimplemindedtobelievethatusingnamingconv entionswithoutnaturallanguagesyntaxlikespacesisgoi ngtobeproductivetoanyone,exceptmaybefoolslikethath aven'tlearnedaneasierwaytonavigateorprocessdocumen tsorinformationthanfromacommandline.
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ThisIsBrilliantWhyDon'tWeJustRemoveSpacesFromEve ry thingWeTypeBecauseYouAreTooLazyToQuoteAFilenameOrP ressTheTabKeyAndLetTheCommandLineInterfaceDoItForY ouAutomatically.WhyDon'tWeJustRemoveSpacesFromEver ythingWeDo,MaybeTheReasonWeHaven'tIsBecauseNoMatte rWhetherYouAreUsingCuteUnderlinesOrCapitalizingEac hWordInTheSentence,ItIsStillHarderToReadAndTakeMor eTimeForTheNaturalProcessingOfInformationInTheBrai nToRecognizeThingsQuickly.IForOneJustThinkYouAreLa zyOrReallySimpleMindedToBelieveThatUsingNamingConv entionsWithoutNaturalLanguageSyntaxLikeSpacesIsGoi ngToBeProductiveToAnyone,ExceptMaybeFoolsLikeThatH aven'tLearnedAnEasierWayToNavigateOrProcessDocumen tsOrInformationThanFromACommandLine.
This is brilliant why don't we just remove spaces from everything we type because you are too lazy to quote a filename or press the tab key and let the command line interface do it for you automatically. Why don't we just remove spaces from everything we do, maybe the reason we haven't is because no matter whether you are using cute underlines or capitalizing each word in the sentence, it is still harder to read and take more time for the natural processing of information in the brain to recognize things quickly. I for one just think you are lazy or really simple minded to believe that using naming conventions without natural language syntax like spaces is going to be productive to anyone, except maybe fools like that haven't learned an easier way to navigate or process documents or information than from a command line.
So which one of these was the easiest for you or anyone to read? Exactly my point. Just like when a computer is storing the name of a video, a song, or anything that might have need for