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.

Comments

Re:Indicative of the brokenness of the system

[russotto]

It might happen, or the patents may prove to be claimed too narrowly to be invalidated easily. How broad does a patent covering VFAT have to make it difficult for competitors to interact with VFAT and still be a novel, non-obvious solution?

It doesn't matter. The reviews for prior art and the determination of patent infringement are separate. What seems to happen is that the patent is read narrowly when looking for a conflict with prior art, and broadly when looking for infringement. So the patent office and courts can simultaneously hold that a piece of prior art does not invalidate the patent, and that a particular device that uses something substantially similar to that same prior art is infringing.