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Germany Rejects Microsoft FAT Patent

Posted by kdawson on from the skinny-on-inventiveness dept.

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.

16 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Ya gotta fight fire with fire by stratjakt · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't fault MSFT for patenting everything they can. Apple does it, Google does it, everyone does it. Eolas does it.

    The system is broken. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
    1. Re:Ya gotta fight fire with fire by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, you hate MSFT for all the business practices you love from Apple or Google.

      I know slashdot is a bunch of young'uns who personify corporations as either friend or foe.

      I'm just pointing out that corporations are things, not beings, and they are a part of a system, and behave as they are supposed to within the system.

      It's the system that was set up to allow robber barons to swindle stockholders, stifle innovation with patents, and clog our legal system with crap.

      --
      I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
    2. Re:Ya gotta fight fire with fire by mstahl · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While it may be best to think of corporations as things and not beings (I don't think it's healthy to think of them as best buddies or arch nemeses either), there really isn't much personification going on. They actually are (at least in the US) legally identical to individuals. That's in the sense that they can commit crimes and get sued or pay taxes.

      It's probably a good thing that corporations can't get married.

    3. Re:Ya gotta fight fire with fire by Scott7477 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I agree with you. The article in ArsTechnica pointed out that at the time of the memo, Microsoft's position in the market was radically different than it is today. MS was a relatively small company compared to the big boys in the enterprise world like IBM and Sun and Novell. The way software was distributed was totally different as well. Given that the Internet was primarily an academic and military system at the time, companies were still sending you boxes of floppies. I recall from graduate school at that time seeing a business plan that contemplating distributing software through vending machines! It seems absurd now, but at the time it wasn't that far out of the ball park. In any case, based on reading the excerpt from the memo, Gates was trying to figure out how best to make money from the business of writing software. Today, the open source community is in the same boat. We want non-restrictive licenses (like MIT's), but also want to put food on the table.

      I don't excuse MS's anti-competitive business practices, and a lot of their frankly dumb decisions over the years. But I can see where Gates has something of a point. To me, since software costs practically nothing to copy, the primary way to make a profit at software is in support. Most general-use software is rather simple to produce these days (see how many different text editors there are). So I don't think most types of software should be patentable.

      --
      "Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
    4. Re:Ya gotta fight fire with fire by kcbrown · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm just pointing out that corporations are things, not beings, and they are a part of a system, and behave as they are supposed to within the system.

      Not really.

      Corporations are supposed to act in the best interests of the society in which they function first and foremost. If that were not the case, then a corporate charter and business license wouldn't be required, now would it?

      The problem is that most people have lost sight of that fact. In exchange for limited liability and effective immortality, corporations are supposed to act with restraint. And in a sane, balanced society, such restraint would be enforced by the revocation of corporate charters in the case of misconduct, just like it was done in the (relatively) distant past.

      People like you have been brainwashed to believe that it's okay for corporations to act in evil ways (if intentionally harming others for personal gain isn't evil, then I don't know what is) because "they're responsible to their shareholders" or some such bullshit.

      But it's not okay. It never has been. Such behaviour is very harmful, and many ills of the world exist because of it. You might say that it's the responsibility of the government to hold corporations accountable for their actions and you would be right about that. But that in no way excuses the behaviour of corporations. That someone might not have been punished for murder doesn't make the act any less wrong.

      People like you need to wake up, and fast, because we're almost out of time. The U.S. is pretty much unrecoverable now but there's still time for the rest of the world. But if corporations aren't held to a much higher standard than we hold them to now, it won't be long before they rule the rest of the world the way they rule the U.S.

      And trust me, that would be a bad thing for just about everyone. The experience with the British East India Company is one of the things that led to the founding of the United States, after all.

      --
      Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
    5. Re:Ya gotta fight fire with fire by mpe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They actually are (at least in the US) legally identical to individuals. That's in the sense that they can commit crimes and get sued or pay taxes.

      Except that corporations don't tend to have their freedoms constrained at the point they are charged with a crime. Not many real people can be "business as usual" whilst awaiting a trial, let alone only only have their lawyers attend the trial. Even if found guilty there is no corporate equivalent of a prison sentence. When it comes to criminal law corporations and individuals are treated (very) differently. Even if the same statute theoretically applies to both situations.

  2. Sorry but, by Jason+Hood · · Score: 4, Funny

    this patent is only valid in the US and Samoa. Germany has no right to allow any Fat patents.

    --
    Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
    1. Re:Sorry but, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      now what's this? a dig at an "yo filesystem so FAT, it got rejected by germany"? weak. just weak.

    2. Re:Sorry but, by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 4, Funny

      "now what's this? a dig at an "yo filesystem so FAT, it got rejected by germany"? weak. just weak."

      Yo mama's so fat we had to format her with NTFS.

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  3. Hmm.. by SevenHands · · Score: 4, Funny

    Doesn't McDonalds already own this patent in Germany?

  4. FAT Patent? by TheVelvetFlamebait · · Score: 5, Funny

    I thought it was only slightly chubby...

    --
    You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
  5. Re:"FAT" - who cares? by Noryungi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whoa!

    Not so fast! Off the top of my head, there is a lot of stuff that still uses FAT: SD-Card, USB sticks, most of the little thingie you stick into a cell phone, a digital camera, and use in embedded systems. Basically everything that can emulate (and does emulate) a floppy disk And what about real floppy disks themselves?

    FAT has got a lot of problems, but it's convenient, simple to implement, and relatively stable. And most of the systems in use today can read and write to it (Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, MacOS, you name it), so it is also convenient for quickly transferring data from those small thingamajigs into you main PeeCee.

    So yeah, FAT is here to stay. It does not do a lot, but what it does, it does well. And that's why rejecting the FAT patent in Germany is Good News(tm).

    --
    The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
  6. Re:Is Germany allowed to patent software? by Scarblac · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  7. This is great... fta by micromuncher · · Score: 3, Interesting

    FTA "[Prevents company from] lay claim to basic computing procedures that in the final analysis are trivial."

    And, FAT is a trivial format, (as are Apple DOS 16, ProDOS, CODOS, and other ancient formats) but FAT has the caveat it is commonly used today in devices such as digital cameras (So pfffft on the person who said its not used.)

    I completely agree with the german PO that a patent has to be on something innovative and inventive. Every time I see a patent for a double-linked list or radix sort I get the shivers.

    --
    /\/\icro/\/\uncher
  8. FAT is old by gr8_phk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:FAT patent by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).