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Microsoft Gets Back Its FAT Patent In Germany
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."
MS has patented Steve 'Sweaty' Ballmer??
I wonder if I can I patent turtle-necked geek with a messiah/god complex.
just saying.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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]