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OIN Posts Details of Microsoft's Anti-Tom Tom Patents
number6x writes "LinuxDevices.com is reporting that the Open Invention Network has posted the details of three of the eight patents used by Microsoft in the Tom Tom suit (which Tom Tom settled last month), asking the community for prior art. These patents cover aspects of the FAT file system. You can find them on Post-Issue.org — see numbers 5579517, 5758352, and 6256642. OIN CEO Keith Bergelt believes that these three patents are of tenuous validity and will probably not survive a review. Bergelt believes that there's a good chance that the USPTO may well invalidate them before the end of the year.
If a few lay-men webanaughts can find prior art in patents that were enough to force a company to settle out of court (for fear of legislation), then clearly the system is so completely broken that I fear it cannot be repaired.
Here is my question: Why should I spend the money that I get from my 9-5 job to start up a new company if a few lazy lawyers can bring me to court and sue me without having any real legal ground? I might as well not bring innovation to the stage and save myself the hassle.
I guess they're going to litigate every single device under 4gb huh
Against a company with that many lawyers and the ability to litigate you to oblivion.
I'm curious why TomTom wouldn't have done this work themselves to invalidate Microsoft's claims and avoid any sort of settlement? Couldn't they have stalled this until a determination was made that either the patent was invalid, or that their methods were based on the prior art - just like Microsoft's?
I'm hoping that TomTom just didnt do their homework and someone manages to come up with the info that they did not.
Makes me wonder how much luck this initiative will have - though I am hoping lots.
On another note, I wonder if an effort to invalidate the patents on the basis of "gee, that's obvious" is taking place as well...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Microsoft does a reverse engineer of most products looking for exploitable liability?
I have a pal who makes CF adapters for MSX computers, I would assume these infringe on "prior art" for FAT.
I suppose they have to make up for the profit drop somehow!
It would be delightfully ironic if Microsoft's use of these patents to troll Tom Tom results in those same patents being invalidated.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
That is exactly what the darkside hopes.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Previously
invalidated then re-validated.
Why the hell weren't they using ext2/3 or anything else? I'm guessing compatibility for the flash card readers for music loaded up by a windows PC or something?
Long AND short file names - This is the ~1 ~2 etc crap you get for file names from the 8.3 format. Probably not the exact same thing but wouldn't Unix symbolic links count? They're old as dirt.
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5579517
Ditto
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT5758352
Flash memory. Remove the word flash and it looks a lot like a textbook from the 70s on file systems 101 would work. Hell it almost looks like this could've been avoided by using a block allocation bitmap instead of storing usage flags in block headers.
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT6256642
Does TomTom get its money back when the patents are invalidated?
-- Cheers!
Silly boy, there is clearly Prior Use of that here on Slashdot.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
The CP/M file system. The original FAT12 file system was directly based on it and is nearly identical.
These are patents on the VFAT/FAT32 long-file-name kludge. They have been fought by PubPat and found invalid, but the patents were restored upon appeal. Read about it and you'll know why I stick with 8.3 file names on the embedded systems I work with. When lawyers are involved, being in the right is the road to bankruptcy!
There's no obvous links to the patents themselves but from their names I'd say they are about VFAT not FAT itself. VFAT is the kludge that allows long file names on FAT filesystems.
If FAT alone was the issue then it would be its own prior art because it was first used in the early '80s, its specifications were widely known well before 1990 and any patents would have expired by now.
These patents date from 1992 to 1995 so only have a few years to run, but long enough to incentivize a switch away from (V)FAT I hope.
The patents are for inventions not covered by the CP/M file system... or in FAT12 for that matter.
You should look up more information on prior art.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Yes. Just to make it clear. The patents do NOT cover:
1. Putting files on a disk
2. The FAT file system
3. Using "long" filenames to name files.
What the patents cover is a scheme by which long filenames are emulated on a FAT disk, which normally can only handle 8.3 filenames.
In addition the patents cover a bit of actual innovation. The obvious method of doing this is to make a hidden file containing the long filenames. Microsoft instead made hidden directory entries (a whole lot of them) containing the long filenames. This is likely to be the second, not first, thing somebody trying to do this would do, so it can be considered an innovation. The reason this works better is that old software ignored the hidden directory entries, not not actual hidden files, so when you deleted all the files with the old software the old software thought the directory really was empty.
Not to belittle your comment but instead software patents in general, yeah, it's called a program, you can make a program do anything you want because it's just an idea. Just because someone made a jerry-rig program to function with other programs which existed at the time doesn't mean it was some amazing "innovation". Anyone can make a program given enough time, the only difference between programs are their feature list, speed, bug numbers, interoperability with other programs, etc, but they've been the same fucking thing from the beginning: software is just software. Fuck patents.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
I agree that the Microsoft patent is bogus. Just wanted to state that things are not as black & white as people make it out to be.
I think a better attack is that you cannot interoperate without violating this patent. If this was a technique by which Microsoft could read/write FAT *faster* than anybody else, then maybe the patent could stand. But in fact you cannot write FAT *at all* without violating this patent, and you must be able to write FAT to use a device that can also be stuck into a Windows machine and work.
That should be considered illegal. I believe this has already be done with mechanical inventions, where you cannot patent exact dimensions of screws, etc.
Good points, or simply that standards are needed for competition, and that the patent system is out of control. I like to simply say that all of that bureaucracy is BS and not needed at all. Save the tax payers money, get rid of all patents and copyrights too at that, and let companies truly, directly, *actually* compete with each other. Let the best things come out naturally due to companies wanting to make sales, instead of letting monopolies strangle everyone, preventing improvements from reaching and benefiting everyone and in the long run stifling all progress.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.