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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.'"
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.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Even though microsoft has a huge patent portfolio, this won't make a bit of difference for anyone. Microsoft doesn't generally enforce the patents it does have. I believe they keep them more as a protection against other companies.
Does anyone know of any major lawsuit where microsoft actually tried to have a patent upheld?
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
A patent on FAT doesn't really have much of a use for them now; at least none that I can think of.
I can think of one really big one - patent infringement. The Linux kernel has FAT read/write capabilties built-in. Now all those systems out there can found guilty of infringing Microsoft's patent.
According to this link: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/fat.asp , three of the patents (U.S. Patent #5,579,517, U.S. Patent #5,758,352 and U.S. Patent #6,286,013) all cover the "Common Name Space for short and long filenames."
What other parts of the FAT filesystem are protected by patents? This aspect of the FAT filesystem is just darn near obsolete as there aren't many systems that absolutely have to have the 8.3 format anymore are there?
Now, I have to admit, this is something that seems fairly specific to Microsoft's needs and is not a feature I've seen in any other filesystem. However, it also seems that this might be fairly easily just...excluded...without causing any really serious issues.
I am probably oversimplifying things.
And why would they want to keep the patent on that again, for other reasons than just appearing "evil"?
Lots of mobile devices and flash memory cards use a form of FAT formatting. You wouldn't believe how many things in the world today use such a fragile filesystem, because it's easy, tested and does not need a strong protection for data loss.
And when Microsoft would suddenly like to force each manufacturer to start paying licence fees, they're all screwed.
Dependency hell? =>
FAT is such a technical piece of crap that I would have thought nobody would want to patent it, out of pure
embarrassment.
For non-technical people who don't grok filesystems, there's a good story about FAT here: CyberSnare.
Floppies died and needed "recovery" quite often, and I dread the thought of trying to recover a 1G flash disk full of important photos or something.
The reason floppies died all the time was not due to the disk layout it was due to faulty media (major problem) or people popping the disk out before the write had finished (minor problem). The FAT layout was quite stable. (well nothing a periodical scandisk/chkdisk couldn't fix).
Sure, FAT doesn't have journalling, but it is very simple as well as being stable, tried and tested and most importantly legacy compatible with almost every O/S out there.
It would be sad to see NTFS taken up for flash media. For one it's also patented but for another Linux support isn't quite there yet.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
People, people, this means nothing. The vendors will just ship their USB drives, and flash media unformatted, and YOU will have to format it as whatever you want. It just so happens that FAT is idea for flash media since there is no metadata to update with every access, thus not destroying the flash media by reading it. (Last accessed date, what a stupid thing to have on flash media)
There's an easy way to get around this: simply ship drives unformatted, and include instructions on how to format it. I'm sure there are other ways to get around it on devices such as digital cameras and such as well.
One thing comes to mind with me: iPod tax
"So don't get programmed by anybody but yourself" --Bill S. Preston, Esquire
A patent on FAT doesn't really have much of a use for them now; at least none that I can think of. Just let the filesystem become an open standard now, MS.
I only wish that were true. The problem is that this is exactly the kind of thing that Microsoft has been after for quite a while. Now that it's everywhere, and it's something that every modern operating system has already implemented, Microsoft is going to go on a licensing spree. After all, they have already been talking about licensing it, long before anyone else considered the idea that the patents might actually be approved.
There are only a few possible ways that this can turn out good:
At any rate, I hope that I'm wrong, and that this is just excessive paranoia on my part. But with Microsoft in this position, I don't think we should rely on optimism and just say that this will all be fine.
Let's recall that even previous slashdot coverage of this issue -- as well as coverage elswhere -- identified that the "fat" patents are written to claim, not the fat-fs as such, but rather, ways of handling long filenames in connection with an underlying fat-fs. (I don't have the links by me to hand right now, sorry.)
That would be much less than a patent on fat as such.
When I last looked at the claims, it did seem that the ways claimed in the patent for handling the long filenames could be subgeneric, i.e. less than exhaustive of all the possibilities. (Granted that a situation like that can still mean that claims are wide enough to be a nuisance.)
So it would probably be more useful to the FOSS community to look at what is actually left from the actual MS patent claims, and whether they leave unpatented, free outside the claims, any other ways of handling the long filenames.
This would be as well as taking account of the possibility that the confirmed patent claims would still be invalidated by prior art or any other reason if it came to a court fight with the opposing party taking a full part there to provide full counterarguments.
This case and its result underline -- again -- the inadequacy of the US patent re-examination procedure -- mainly because of the unequal treatment that it gives to the party wishing to oppose the patent.
A failed attempt to get the patent invalidated is unhelpful to the community, because the patent holder can always point to the result when the prior art arguments come up again, and can argue that they have already been officially considered and rejected, so no need to review them.
It would arguably be better not to use US re-examination in the first place, if there is an assessment that the patent holder could wriggle out of the allegations of prior art when the other party is not there to answer -- because stopped by the procedure from answering to nail the errors in the arguments of the patent-holder.
It might also be recommendable for the PPF, instead of rushing in to raise proceedings that fail when there is no current and urgent need actually to bring them at that point in time, instead to give wide publicity first to the evidence and arguments against a nuisance patent, and to encourage debate about it.
The resulting debate could bring facts to light, e.g. that strengthen the prior art arguments.
New facts and evaluations can also shed light on the defendable scope of the claims, and make it clearer what techniques actually lie free outside them -- maybe even indicating that invalidation proceedings are not necessary.
At least, wider discussion can make it a bit easier for PPF or anybody else to weigh up the prospects of success before weighing in with action.
-wb-
People are asking what the alternatives are. Well, ext filesystems are great, if you're using Linux, but they are totally unreasonable if you, like 98% of the market, is using Windows. Get rid of that idea.
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.
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.
So then, is it the media or the device that will be pinned? If it's the device, that is bad news for open source. That means we lost our ability to write to disks that can be read by Windows. Hey, if the ISO9660 thing from above works, I see no reason why we couldn't format floppies that way, but we still couldn't read them. Will they be able to retroactively collect royalties from Linux distro organizers? Now that is a scary idea. How many copies of Linux have been distributed, even if not used?
How does this work with interoperability? Would it now be illegal to interoperate with a FAT formatted disk without coming to an agreement with microsoft?
It doesn't matter where in the chain they take the 25 cents, it will still only raise the end-user price by 25 cents.
As for digital cameras... well that was their decision. Unless I, as a consumer, am going to get fined for buying a piece of hardware that was unlicenced I don't care. The patents on FAT were no secret. They were, as are all the other patents, kept in a public place, next to the patents for lenses, CCDs, batteries and jpeg compression. As with any other patent, if you want to use the tech you have to pay the licence... and then pass that cost onto the customer.
Except that these patents weren't around when they were making these decisions. These FAT patents were *rejected*. Why would a company base a decision around patents that were rejected by the UPTO? This is yet another example of the USPTO's stupidity - VFAT was created how long ago? Some where between 92 and 95 IIRC. So at least 10 years ago. VFAT has had 10 years to creep into all corners of the industry, and only now it's going to start costing money? Imagine if 5 years after the motor industry really got going, the patent for internal combustion engines was finally approved. Progress of science and useful arts my ass.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Microsoft just has to "crack the whip" at Suse/Novell, RedHat, Mandriva and Circular (*ubuntu) and stop them from shipping FAT drivers.
...
So no interoperability with: USB keys, Digital Cameras, MP3/Video Players, etc
Or in another word no Desktop Linux except for a couple of died in the whool hackers that are willing to download the driver in Brasil/Lithuania/Transdniestrian Moldovia/...
M$ does not need to stop ALL linux users, 60/80% are enough.
Just look at the difficulties we have with deCSS on Linux.
Where actually it becomes LESS illegal to download a blockbuster on a P2P network than to play the DVD you PAID for (of course depending of where you leave, but in Europe it is pretty much the case).
So it is a very bad news, somebody should fully investigate all the persons in the USPTO involved, and send them to jail.
C# and CLR on linux people take note, Microsoft never acts in good faith. Why file for patents unless you plan to enforce them? Ever heard the phrase "trust a fox"?
They're also kinda buggy. I'm using them right now since I couldn't format my 120GB IDE drive for FAT32 past 32GB or so (and there was no way in hell I was splitting it up into 4 pieces), and I wasn't too sure what else I could use to format for FAT32, so I used ext2.
It's been interesting what happens. If I look in a folder with thumbnails, it generates a thumb.db file, followed by a thumb.db::encryptable file. When you delete the ::encryptable file, Windows tends to choke (though it still deletes), so you have to delete several times if you've got a lot of images or video to delete.
I've also had problems with installing/uninstalling software. It wouldn't allow me to install World of Warcraft at all on it. I installed Final Fantasy XI on it, but then ran into problems that it couldn't save my settings. Even worse was that when I tried to uninstall it, I'd bluescreen and have to do it again. What I ended up doing was just deleting the folder from the disk, then uninstalling (which worked, which boggled my mind because there was nothing left for it to uninstall except registry entries).
They've been fine otherwise, but I'd rather have my FAT32 back. It's far less buggy, and it's fairly stable in Linux as well.
They go up because they (sellers) have to pay tax to the Govt. based on the date they SOLD the item to you, not on the date they bought the item from manufacturer.
Sheesh, can't you get your economics 101 right?
Hmmm...how hard is this to figure out? Let's see...
I got it! Let's not pre-install any file system! Woah! That's a dangerous idea!
The fact that the manufacturer may pre-install a FAT based file system does not equate to the manufacturer being required to pre-install any file system.
Memory, whether in the form of RAM, EPROM (in all its various flavors), or some sort of spinning opto/mechanical media, does not have a file system until someone puts one there. Send out unformatted flash cards and they get whatever file system is applied by the user's equipment!
"Score:4, Informative"? You have alot of room to talk about moderation!
Evolutionary thinking will move you down the road, revolutionary thinking will put you on a new road!
The problem with that is that you somehow have to provide drivers for each and every version of OS X, Linux and Windows for each and every architecture that supports the medium (in the case of USB mass storage that's a lot of architectures). You can expect Windows to need at least drivers for Win98/ME, Win2k, WinXP and Vista (maybe even more than one driver for Vista, with the different versions and IA-32/AMD64). OS X needs two drivers minimum (10.0 compatible for PPC and Intel), probably more like six different versions (10.0 to 10.4 for PPC, 10.4 for Intel). As for Linux you'd need userland drivers (making certain kernel options neccessary) for each architecture and minor kernel version - that's about thirty drivers for Linux. The drivers alone would eat up much of a 128 MB USB stick. Sure, you can leave some OSes out by using a file system that's already in use (like ext3), but...
There still are other OSes that might be used to access the medium. If they don't natively support whichever file system you use they can't access your files at all. Even worse: Some clueless user might confuse the FAT16 partition with the main partition and "erase all those old driver files" to make room, mking the drive unusable in most OSes. And no, you can't make the driver partition read-only because you need to be able to put new drivers on it - you don't want your medium to be obsoleted just because a new kernel that's binary incompatible with the existing drivers comes sout, do you?
Besides, I'm lumping it all together as FAT32. FAT12 is only used on floppy disks anymore and FAT16 has been superseded by FAT32. Still, FAT32 is one of the worst file systems in use today and should be replaced by something better. I'm not even speaking about patents, FAT32 is just becoming old. It's good enough for today, but if we don't think about a replacement now we won't have one ready when we need it in ten years (plus/minus a couple).
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I wonder which force drives customers stronger: the simple convenience of plugging the thumb drive in and having Winderz read it immediately, or the lowest price. Any thumb drive that has to pay royalties for the convenience, which requires a filesystem, is going to lose the price advantage by having to pay for that filesystem.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
But when a user pops their CF/SD/XD/whatever card out of their camera, they're going to want to access it without installing drivers, etc.
I think you missed the point.
The point was that the storage device manufacturers can ship their devices unformatted, so they don't run afoul of the patent, and don't have to build a royalty payment to the Evil Empire into their price. Since some storage devices are cheap enough that the royalty payment might constitute a significant part of their price, that's a good thing.
Cameras will probably still use FAT, for exactly the reason you mention. When you insert an unformatted card into a camera, the camera will format it. No problem. And an extra 25 cents in the price of a digital camera isn't going to mean much because cameras are more expensive anyway.
I'm more concerned about the potential effect on open source implementations. The Linux vfat filesystem, for example, does implement the long name/short name encoding scheme that is, I believe, the target of the patent. If Microsoft could force all of the major Linux distros to remove vfat support from their kernels, they could deal a significant blow to Linux's ability to interoperate with Windows and with most of the digital cameras on the market.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Thats why Linus needs to move the kernel.org server not from California to Oregon, but from Oregon to the EU*. That way MS can bitch all they want about vFat in the kernel, but can't get it out of the kernel cause the EU (for the time being, and if MS does try to enforce this agienst Linux, won't ever) have software patents.
*this would also mean Linus and everyone working on the kernel would have to move to the EU, and also a fork in the kernel in the US that does not included vFat.
no, YOU missed the point
$0.25 added to the price of a camera is a trivial amount
$0.25 added to the price of every flash chip is not a trivial amount
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter