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Microsoft Gets Back Its FAT Patent In Germany

Posted by kdawson on from the break-out-the-fatback-recipes dept.

Dj writes to let us know that Microsoft has regained its FAT patent in Germany. (We discussed it three years ago when the German Federal Patent Tribunal ruled that Microsoft's patent on the FAT file system, with short and long names, was not enforceable.) "The [German] appeal court's decision brings it into line with the US patent office's assessment of the FAT patent. In early 2006, after lengthy deliberations, the latter confirmed the rights to protection conferred by [US] patent number 5,579,517, claiming that the development was new and inventive."

25 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. My first thought... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    MS has patented Steve 'Sweaty' Ballmer??
    I wonder if I can I patent turtle-necked geek with a messiah/god complex.

  2. Microsoft gets Back Fat? There's an iDiet for that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    just saying.

  3. Software Patents in Germany by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just too bad that software patents can not be inforced in germany. They only exist for a possible future change of german or european patent law. A change which is currently rather unlikely.

  4. Timelines by coniferous · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Isnt there a statue of limitations in germany? I mean, FAT is like 20 years old.

  5. I thought Europe didn't allow software patents? by Palestrina · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What am I missing?

    1. Re:I thought Europe didn't allow software patents? by H.G.Blob · · Score: 2, Informative

      The European Patent Office usually does not grant software only patents but that doesn't mean that each country can't have a diverging policy. If you RTFA, the original decision was in part motivated by the EU policy on software patents.

    2. Re:I thought Europe didn't allow software patents? by Arancaytar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You're missing the fine print loophole. Yes, software applications are not patentable.

      However, the loophole is that an invention that solves a "technical problems" in a non-obvious way (rather than just a "business problem") is still patentable - which according to this court decision includes file systems.

      As far as this non-lawyer can see, that makes the law a paper shell because it protects only software that is obviously not patentable anyway (Say, Microsoft getting a patent on word processors*) but leaves algorithms unprotected. (Ironically, algorithms are also considered unpatentable in the narrowest sense, which is why patents have to replace the word "algorithm" with one that the Patent Office does not understand.)

      (*Or Amazon getting a patent on a web shop UI... OH WAIT. :P )

  6. Retroactive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This seems fucked up. The patent was invalidated, which allowed anyone to implement the technology from the patent. Now, they're saying that the patent is valid, which means that anyone who implemented technology from the patent has been retroactively made a criminal. They will have to pay royalties on anything they sold, and they will be unable to sell their product anymore, even if they spent millions on developing it (unless they get a license from Microsoft).

  7. Re:Oblig reference... by WillDraven · · Score: 2, Informative

    I believe the correction you are looking for is "statute."

    --
    This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
  8. FAT is antiquated by clone53421 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does this have any practical significance? Am I missing something? Is FAT still worth enough for them to bother fighting to have their patent in Germany?

    --
    Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
    1. Re:FAT is antiquated by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      FAT is, indeed, an antique; but it is still pretty much the only FS that is trivial enough to implement in your cheap digital camera or USB MSC MP3 player, or whatever, that is also supported out of the box by MS operating systems.

      That is why FAT is still worth something to Microsoft. Even for fairly fiddly embedded systems, there are plenty of free filesystems that are easily good enough. For real computers, FAT would be absurd. If, however, you are making a fiddly embedded system that also has to share a filesystem with a real computer, FAT is basically your choice(or exFAT, which is newer and more evil, and will be patent protected even longer).

      Microsoft has absolutely no incentive to support ext2, 3, or 4, or HFS, or any of the others, and NTFS is a bit much for the lighter-weight embedded systems.

    2. Re:FAT is antiquated by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Insightful

      FAT is needed because Microsoft has effective control of it's OS platform and any other new filesystem standard is going to create a similar patent and support nightmare.

      Microsoft is going to do it's hardest to trap it's users and make everyone else seem like 2nd class (just like Apple does).

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    3. Re:FAT is antiquated by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      My understanding is that there isn't any real technical obstacle to implementing other FSes on Windows(though to work with the newest ones, you might well need to play the WHQL/driver signing game, which isn't free, and would give MS the option of stonewalling you); but that, in practice, there is basically no way that that is going to happen.

      Customers(sensibly enough) are going to balk at being asked to install a kernel driver just to get a flash drive or generic MP3 player to work and, even if they would go for it, MS can easily enough make FAT licensing sufficiently cheap that it just isn't worth the effort and support nightmare of producing a fully supported ext2 implementation for Windows.

      Hopefully the patents involved will expire soon.

    4. Re:FAT is antiquated by Darinbob · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The patent covers the long file name implementation. This isn't a patent on FAT in general. So a USB card will not be patent infringing. Even if there are long file names on it, the infringer is whatever created those files. This would be things like digital cameras for instance that actually create files, or other operating systems, etc. Reading the long file names would not be affected by the patents.

  9. Stupid Headline by fm6 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The patent is not for the FAT filesystem itself. The patent is for the kludge that allows FAT to support both long filenames and 8.3 filenames.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_filename

    1. Re:Stupid Headline by hvdh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The patent is not for the FAT filesystem itself. The patent is for the kludge that allows FAT to support both long filenames and 8.3 filenames.

      Kludge is quite right. I was pretty surprised to find out that on CDROMs, a long filename had a different 8.3 name when listed in pure DOS vs. in a Windows 98 (?) command shell.

    2. Re:Stupid Headline by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      CDs don't use FAT. Probably ISO 9660. In which case the bug would be in Microsoft's implementation of that standard.

    3. Re:Stupid Headline by anonum · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yes and there's a linux kernel patch that should cleverly circumvent that patent
      http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/FAT-patch/
      http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/6/26/313
      It hasn't apparently been tested in court so far though.

      On U.S. soil, one wouldn't probably want to acid-test the above patch in court, somewhere was mentioned that it may cost up to $5M to defend yourself in court for a single patent infringiment, even if you would not turn out to be infringing a patent at all.

  10. Re: Who Cares by mr_da3m0n · · Score: 4, Informative

    Tell this to cameras, PDAs, consoles, embedded devices... In a windows-dominated world, what else would you use that everyone could read from write to? NTFS? Ha, no.

  11. So... by ProdigyPuNk · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft was basically granted a patent for throwing metadata in unused volume labels ? Why would anyone even WANT to violate the patent ? According to the Wikipedia entry on Long Filename, too many files with the same first six letters will cause issues. Man, that is one hell of a hack.

  12. The geek mind-set by westlake · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wonder how much that cost MS. Bribes aren't cheap.

    Loose talk about bribery is for losers.

    Given the importance of complex legal codes, {German] judges must be particularly well trained. Indeed, judges are not chosen from the field of practicing lawyers. Rather, they follow a distinct career path. At the end of their legal education at university, all law students must pass a state examination before they can continue on to an apprenticeship that provides them with broad training in the legal profession over two years. They then must pass a second state examination that qualifies them to practice law. At that point, the individual can choose either to be a lawyer or to enter the judiciary. Judicial candidates start working at courts immediately, however they are subjected to a probationary period of up to five years before being appointed as judges for lifetime. Judiciary of Germany

    1. Re:The geek mind-set by westlake · · Score: 4, Informative

      Ah, so, your counter to talk about bribery is about how judges "follow a distinct path" and are exceptionally well trained?

      Consider how many years you have invested in becoming a judge-for-life. That it is the only life you have ever known. How likely is it that you will consider throwing it all away?

      Did you forget that judges will meet quite a few people who choose "lawyer" at the end of that path?

      The judge in a German court is more than a referee:

      There is no such thing as a jury trial in Germany.


      Under German law, as under American law, the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. In minor [criminal] cases there may be only a single judge presiding. Or, if the charges are severe and the accused faces heavy penalties, there may be five persons hearing the case - three professional judges and two lay judges.


      Though he has the duty of defending the accused to the maximum of his ability, a German lawyer is not as active in court as an American lawyer. In a German trial, the judge, not the defense counsel or the prosecutor, obtains the testimony of the witnesses. After the judge is finished, the prosecutor and the defense counsel will be permitted to question witnesses. The aim is to obtain the truth from witnesses by direct questioning rather than through the examination and cross-examination generally used in a US trial.       German Justice: 2 Days per Murder [2003]

  13. Similar 8.3 file naming schemes have also existed by viralMeme · · Score: 2, Informative

    `Similar 8.3 file naming schemes have also existed on earlier CP/M, Atari, and some Data General and Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer operating systems'

  14. How Linux avoids this patent by steveha · · Score: 4, Informative

    The patent issue here is not how to store a long filename in a FAT directory. The patent covers the technique for making a file system where each file has two names, and 8.3 "short" name and a "long" name.

    This was crucial back in the day. Your Windows 3.1 system could read the floppy disk written by your Windows 95 computer; that file you saved as "ode to a summer day.txt" would wind up as ODETOA~1.TXT in Windows 3.1, and you could access the file.

    But these days, nobody really cares about the 8.3 "short" filenames. Windows XP, Windows 7, Mac OS, etc. all just look at the long filenames.

    So, Andrew Tridgell made a change to the Linux VFAT driver, and now Linux writes a valid long filename, and puts horrible junk in the space for the 8.3 filename. The horrible junk includes illegal characters for a filename. Thus, Linux is not writing both a long and a short filename, and thus isn't infringing.

    And Linux still has the FAT driver, in addition to the VFAT driver. The FAT driver reads and writes 8.3 filenames only. In the event that you have a volume with nothing but 8.3 filenames, you can still use it with Linux.

    http://www.osnews.com/story/21766/Linux_Kernel_Patch_Works_Around_Microsoft_s_FAT_Patents

    The FAT long filenames patent should expire sometime around 2015, at which time Linux will return to full compatibility. (I presume that in countries that don't enforce software patents, people are still using Linux with full compatibility.)

    steveha

    --
    lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  15. Re:Similar 8.3 file naming schemes have also exist by mattdm · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeahhhhh.... but that's not the patent.