Slashdot Mirror
Germany Rejects Microsoft FAT Patent
Askmum writes in with news that a German patent court has ruled Microsoft's patent on FAT invalid in that country, finding that it is "not based on inventive activity." Just one of 6,000-odd patents Microsoft has amassed since a 1991 memo from Bill Gates turned around the company's attitude to patents.
Not true. Every country has its own rules. Besides those, there's also a European patent court, which isn't actually part of the EU, just a cooperation of European countries. That court officially doesn't allow software patents but does in practice; Germany's patent law is different, I have no idea.
The "EU patent directive" and the fight over software patents that's covered now and then on /. is about a EU proposal to do away with all this and replace it by a single EU system, and about whether software patents should be part of that.
This is "Slashdot knowledge", I have no actual knowledge of law, so...
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
FAT itself was documented in 1983 (or earlier?) in Byte magazine. It can not be and is not patented today as I understand it. My understanding is that MS patented the long filename feature that came along later. Lets not confuse basic FAT functionality with long file names. It's also more interesting to call it a long filename patent, as it sounds even dumber than a FAT patent.
Well, what Microsoft holds the a (purportedly valid) patent on isn't FAT or FAT32. It's on the particular algorithm for mapping long filenames into an 8.3 format and (I think) storing the long filename where it can be found. What the German court found was that a) the idea of doing such a mapping isn't original enough to be potentially patentable, and b) even if it was, the Rock Ridge extensions to the ISO-9660 filesystem (specifically the parts that allow mapping of Unix long filenames to the 8.3 upper-case-only native 9660 names) are similar enough to be prior art and invalidate MS's patent (as it would be simply an obvious extension of that prior art).