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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.'"
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?
My pics.
Wishful thinking aside - Microsoft have allready stated they're going to enforce the patent:
From Microsoft's FAT licensing page:
At 25c a unity, thats going to add up to a helluva lot of money.
My pics.
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.
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
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...
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
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.
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.
This is a boring sig
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.
http://kered.org
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.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Update:
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 :\