Microsoft FAT Patent Upheld

theodp writes "After initially rejecting Microsoft's File Allocation Table (FAT) patents, the USPTO has ruled them valid. From the article: 'Microsoft has won a debate where they were the only party allowed to speak, in that the patent re-examination process bars the public from rebutting arguments made by Microsoft, said unimpressed Public Patent Foundation President Dan Ravicher.'"

Comments

Re:So now...

[tpgp]

What does that mean to companies that sell stuff like USB flash drives or CF cards? They'll obviously have to pay royalties, of course,

Yep, they will pricing has been set to 25c per unit.

Utterly crippling in the low margin, high volume USB storage market (especially at the low end)

and that means a mass migration to a new filesystem to avoid such payments.

And exactly what filesystem could that be? That is supported out of the box by 95% of desktop PCs?

This - if anyone was still wondering why a monopoly is so dangerous in the hands of an immoral company like MS.

You can use your overwhelming advantage in one market (desktop PCs) to exert influence in another.

But what new FS will that be? FAT32? EXT2/3?

Fat32? Patents cover it.

EXT2/3? Get real. Who wants to install 3rd party drivers every time you plugin your USB device?

Re:So now...

[tpgp]

It would be stupid for Microsoft to enforce this patent because of the migration issue. If they were smart, they'd immediately turn around and put this into the public domain. If they don't, I can't see the marketplace relying on the hope that someday Microsoft won't try to enforce the patent. So if they were protecting their own interests that's fine, but they need to send a clear message that this move was only done to make sure that nobody would screw them

Wishful thinking aside - Microsoft have allready stated they're going to enforce the patent:

From Microsoft's FAT licensing page:

A license for manufacturers of certain consumer electronics devices--Pricing for this license is $0.25 per unit for each of the following types of devices that use removable solid state media to store data:

        * Portable digital still cameras
        * Portable digital video cameras
        * Portable digital still/video cameras
        * Portable digital audio players
        * Portable digital video players
        * Portable digital audio and video players
        * Multifunction printers
        * Electronic photo frames
        * Electronic musical instruments
        * Standard televisions

At 25c a unity, thats going to add up to a helluva lot of money.

Re:Less important than it sounds

[bosson]

Get your facts right. They are using FAT-patents to get license fees from storage manufacturers. And they started using it *after* storage manufacturers where using vfat as a standard for flash drives.

So the methods bears all the marks of asserting broad patents against standardization initiatives. The set of patents they hold could just as easy be used to kill off mozilla or any other competitor, but they should be playing it safe not to upset any legislators too early.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

The claims in US patent No. 5579517 - the patnet that was subject to re-examination - are rather strange, and to my reasding are not infringed by a Linux system reading or writing a vfat file system. The analysys is not straightforward, but as a clue to those used to looking at patent claims, think about the effect of the opening words of the claim: "In a computer system having a processor running an operating system..." followed by the words "said short filename including at most a maximum number of characters that is permissible by the operating system", i.e., not some other operating system but by the executing operating system.

US Patent 5758352 is more of a worry, because it relates to the way in which long and short filenames are stored in a directory structure by an (i.e., any) operating system. I cannot find any reference to this potentially much more damaging patent having been re-examined.

Note that the claims are not infringed by any system that does not support both long and short filenames. It is not FAT per se that is being protected, it is the backwards-compatible DOS filenames and the particular manner in which they are stored. You have to read the claims to understand this.

So the question about Linux etc., requires an analysis of the claims with an understanding of how the Linux FS driver works.

HTH
Anonymous European Patent Attorney

Chain of events

[daBass]

1. Microsoft spearheads USB standard
2. "Mass Storage Class" added to USB that is so low level, the OS uses it as any disk, needing to support it's file systems
3. 95% of computers run windows and the ones that support USB only support FAT, forcing device manufacturers to use that as filesystem.
4. Patent filesystem and demand royalties after the fact
5. No need for "???"
6. Profit!

Yup, they planned this all along, the sneaky bastards.

Re:Food chain

[dabraun]

Actually, it's hard to see how the flash drives are even impacted by this issue - they don't have a filesystem (unless the manufacturer formats them which they really don't have to) - the filesystem is used by the software that reads and writes to them. So, it may impact digital cameras, or other OS's that write to FAT, or even printers that can read directly from memory cards - but I don't see how it would impact the card itself any more than it would impact a hard drive or other form of generic storage.

Re:Food chain

[redhog]

There are Free Software ext2 drivers for all major OSes:
Windows: http://freshmeat.net/projects/ext2ifs/
MacOS X: http://freshmeat.net/projects/ext2fs/
OS/2: http://freshmeat.net/projects/ext2-os2/

The problem is, they don't come pre-installed...

Re:alternatives and extent

[m50d]

What about one of the ISO filesystems? There's an ISO for CDROM filesystems, and I imagine that thing isn't always read-only. If anyone has a flash disk and wants to format it as an ISO9660 filesystem and see if Windows can read/write it, that would be nice of them. I don't have either.

ISO9660 is completely non-writeable - the filesystem is designed in such a way that you simply can't write to it. However, its successor, UDF, is writeable, and is already being used by flash drives which are too big for FAT (>32GB).

Second, what product is hit by this? People are going on about shipping unformatted media, but think about it: most devices that use the media have to speak FAT as well. Your camera can't write a file to the flash card if it doesn't understand how to read and write to it, even if rudimentary. The unformatted argument only works for media that will only be used on a PC, which seems like it will be a small minority.

Absolutely. Anything that has to access its own disk is at risk - the main things I see are cameras, MP3 players and possibly PDAs. A camera could just use another filesystem and be accessible via PTP, and since that just specifies how to transfer files, I suppose in theory it could be used for MP3 players as well, it has support from all major OSes.

Embedded filesystems library affected

[Yseboodt]

I'm the author of the Embedded filesystems library. (http://sf.net/projects/efsl)

I've read the patents, they all cover the long filenames ability in the FAT filesystem. So basically as long as I do not implement long filesystem support, the EFSL should be free from patent problems.

If anyone with a deeper understanding of legalese is willing to comment on this, I and the users of EFSL would be grateful.

Since EFSL is targetted at embedded devices, it is used commercially (I am using it in a commercial product as well, and I know of several other projects that are doing the same) and thus the companies using it should know wheter or not they can use EFSL without paying a fee to microsoft.

FAT is about the ugliest filesystem around, it's a shame they dare to ask licensing fees for it.

The Patents

[Midnight Thunder]

I think to understand what it means to companies, then we need to look at what the patents are:

Patent: 5,579,517
Title: Common name space for long and short filenames
Filed: 24 April 1995

An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file. Each file has a short filename directory entry and may have at least one long filename directory entry associated with it. The number of long filename directory entries that are associated with a file depends on the number of characters in the long filename of the file. The long filename directory entries are configured to minimize compatibility problems with existing installed program bases.

Patent: 5,758,352
Title: Common name space for long and short filenames
Filed: 5 September 1996

An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file. Each file has a short filename directory entry and may have at least one long filename directory entry associated with it. The number of long filename directory entries that are associated with a file depends on the number of characters in the long filename of the file. The long filename directory entries are configured to minimize compatibility problems with existing installed program bases.

Patent: 6,286,013
Title: Method and system for providing a common name space for long and short file names in an operating system
Filed: 28 January 1997

An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file. Each file has a short filename directory entry and may have at least one long filename directory entry associated with it. The number of long filename directory entries that are associated with a file depends on the number of characters in the long filename of the file. The long filename directory entries are configured to minimize compatibility problems with existing installed program bases.

So the patents in question all cover the same issue of a "common name space for long and short filenames". This would effect anyone using vfat and also potentially effect Rockridge and Joliet extensions for ISO 9660.

One thing to note, from looking at the licensing page, is that only "consumer electronics devices" and "removable solid state media manufacturers" are targeted. For the moment operating systems aren't listed.

One thing I have to ask myself whether makers of digital cameras would be legaly required to have to pay this license, despite them being listed in the "consumer electronics devices" section. The reason I ask this is because all the digital cameras I have seen to date still use 8.3 format file names (for example my Nikon is DSCN0000.jpg), therefore they are not using the technologies referenced by the patents.

Re:Food chain

[baadger]

There are infact several choices of upto date maintained Ext2/3 drivers for Windows.

1. ext2fsd which has support for Win64 (x64)
2. ext2ifs by John Newbigin (the one linked by parent). It says on the website "This version probably does not work under XP SP2".
3. ext2ifs by Stephan Schreiber. It's freeware but doesn't appear to be Open Source (so presumeably contains no GPL'd code). There are Windows XP screenshots on the site and it's x86 only.

Re:Food chain

[Marillion]

A device like a USB key fob is blank storage. Like a really big floppy. It doesn't violate because it doesn't have an algorithm that implements FAT. Cameras, on the other hand, have to save their images in a structured way. They do implement a FAT algorithm.

Re:USB Sticks and CF cards

[deander2]

Actually someone named George B. Selden (who had never built an automobile) held a patent on a "road engine". All American car manufacturers paid royalties to him until Henry Ford came along, who blatantly ignored it (and later got it overturned).

Patent trolls are nothing new to society.

Re:Food chain

[diamondsw]

The problem is, they don't come supported either. From the web page:

It is written for OS X 10.2-10.3.

No, they didn't just omit 10.4 accidentally, or not update the page. It doesn't work at all:

Apple completely changed the kernel interfaces in Tiger and as such, a lot of work needs to be done to get the Ext2 driver running on Tiger. I started some of this work last year after WWDC, but there is still a lot to do and I don't have the time to finish things up right now.

...

I've started getting back to bringing up the driver on Tiger. Progress is going well, everything is compiling (but not necessarily running) except for the vnops file. I still have to implement locking and then testing before a release can happen.

Re:What about UDF?

[moyix]

Update:

• This page indicates that Windows does *not* have UDF write support without the use of a third party program, like DirectCD or Nero's offering, InCD.
• Linux does have write support for UDF filesystems, but it's not turned on in the default kernel config.
• It's difficult to find anything definitive about OSX, but the consensus from the interweb is that OS X can't currently handle writing to UDF without third party software.

So this probably won't work as a universal filesystem unless some pressure is put on MS and Apple to get native support for writing to UDF, unfortunately :\