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: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

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.

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 :\