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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, and that means a mass migration to a new filesystem to avoid such payments.
But what new FS will that be? FAT32? EXT2/3?
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Guess it's time for that diet.
How will this affect the ability to read FAT filesystems under Linux?
They finally patented Steve Ballmer.
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.
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.
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.
what about software that can create a FAT file system? Do those entities who distribute such software have to pay? How about users who format a drive, are they required now?
I'm under no obligation to use FAT on my USB sticks. They come with a FAT filing table, but the functionality of the device isn't compromised by my using a different file system. USB stick manufacturers could simply sell their wares unformatted like the old floppy days, or you could pay $0.50 more and get a formatted one. Let the consumer decide.
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.
Having a single filesystem that is accessible to all is good for everyone, especially Windows users. If Microsoft make it difficult to use digital cameras with their operating systems then they're going to piss a lot of people off. Digital cameras are one of the few reasons people buy a new computer so making it difficult to use digital cameras on Windows systems is not in their interests but perhaps worse for Microsoft is that people will install software that lets them use EXT3, Reiser4, UFS or heavens forbid, HFS+. People could use harddisks from other operating systems, with no need to defrag, decent meta information and genuine multi-user support!
I work with OS X, Debian and NT4 on a daily basis. The only way I can predicitably transfer files between them is using FAT16/32, and the limiting factor is NTs lousy support for alien filesystems. Microsoft should place FAT in the public domain. Its not strong enough to warrent a licence, and should really have become extinct along side the floppy disk. Charging people a licence to use a technology that was chosen because of a weakness in your main project, your operating system, is as lame as lecturers teaching from their own book.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
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.
A fax tax you say? At 25 cents a pound, half of slashdot now owe microsoft 100 bucks.
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.
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.
Marc McDonald is the inventor of FAT. If memory serves it was created to support Altair Disk Basic.
Bill Gates has received the credit in print. The confusion probably happened because Bill Gates identifies himself completely with Microsoft.
Marc designed it to be optimized for floppies, with an allocation table sized to stay resident even in the tiny RAM of the machines of those days. He always thought it was a little silly to use it on hard disks.
What can you possibly patent about a FAT table? It's more or less a huge array!
;-)
While the rest of the world is exploring new ways to implement filesystems and thus producing innovation, what one of the most rich and powerful software company in the world does?
It bloody well enforce patents about twenty-five-years old bloody technologies.
Silly of me to think they were working to finish that WinFS of theirs, instead.
Look out for your helloworlds, they'll be knocking at your door with patent no. 1340032423 very soon.
PS: How much for these patents to expire? Fortunately I live in Europe, so I can keep FAT support in my GNU/Linux kernel
42.
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-
As usual with these things, I am struggling with how MS have gotten around what I would see as prior art. The CP/M file system, developed by Digital Research in ~ 1977. I wrote a defrag and badblock utility for CP/M and CP/M-86 in the 80's, and it's not a huge leap from the CP/M FS to a FAT FS. DR are long dead but it still begs the question....did MS really dream this up?
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?
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.
Every OS supports it for the purposes of reading DVDs. It may not have been designed for flash drives, but it works on them fine. And it's an ISO standard.
I am trolling
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
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"?
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.
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.
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.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
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 grandparent posted is correct.
1) Even if they do have FAT pre-installed, that doesn't matter. A patent applies to the device that is using the FAT system (camera, computer, etc.), not the media it is on. (For example: A patent woudl apply to a printing press, but not to the book that is printed by the press.)
2) His point is that they don't have to have it pre-installed anyway. The device you put it in can do the formatting easily enough.
Also, just because something is modded-up that you think is wrong, doesn't mean that the moderation system is bad. You may be modded down merely for the comment.
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
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.
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.