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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.'"
Guess it's time for that diet.
How will this affect the ability to read FAT filesystems under Linux?
They finally patented Steve Ballmer.
What exactly would prevent these low margin, high volume USB key manufacturers selling their memory sticks unformatted? It's not like hard drive manufacturers have to pay a FAT tax -- it's just the device manufacturers whose stuff actually uses FAT, like digital camera makers.
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.
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.
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!
it's just the device manufacturers whose stuff actually uses FAT, like digital camera makers.
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.
Personally I don't mind cameras, etc using ext2, or even better - a proper flash filesystem designed to deal with the problems inherent in writing to flash. But then I don't use Windows...
I'd be interested to know what the monopoly-police think about this - it seems that requiring people to pay a licence fee to use the only supported filesystem in the monopoly OS to allow interoperability with other devices might be considered an abuse of their market position.
It's also worth thinking about - the Linux kernel infringes this patent. Is Linux going to have FAT support ripped out of it now? That'd be really bad coz suddenly it can't interoperate with all those devices using FAT.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
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.