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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.
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
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.
Woa....they can reject patents? ;)
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I guess being a Patent attorney gives me a little different view on things like this.
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.