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German Court Invalidates Microsoft FAT Patent

Posted by Soulskill on from the exercising-their-patent-rejection-muscles-to-get-rid-of-the-fat dept.

walterbyrd sends this news from Techworld: "A Microsoft storage patent that was used to get a sales ban on products from Google-owned Motorola Mobility in Germany has been invalidated by the German Federal Patent Court. Microsoft's FAT (File Allocation Table) patent, which concerns a 'common name space for long and short filenames' was invalidated on Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Federal Patent Court said in an email Friday. She could not give the exact reasons for the court's decision before the written judicial decision is released, which will take a few weeks."

11 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. Well... there goes Microsofts Android ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There goes Microsofts Android extortion profits...

    1. Re:Well... there goes Microsofts Android ... by symbolset · · Score: 5, Informative

      The appropriate reference page.

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      Help stamp out iliturcy.
  2. Licensees should be able to recover their payments by putaro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There should be a way to get a refund if you paid license fees for an invalid patent. Anyone have a guess as to how much money Microsoft has made off this patent?

  3. Re:What about FAT32 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Every camera, phone and tablet manufacturer should use UDF to format flash cards. It's patent free and supported by all major operating systems. The only thing missing is write support in Windows XP, but it would cost Google pennies to write a free driver, compared to the billions they pay Microsoft for FAT patents.

  4. Expect Nexus phones to have SD cards... by bogaboga · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...that is at least in Germany. Google never wanted to pay any licensing fees. It's been Google's modus operandi for years.

    1. Re:Expect Nexus phones to have SD cards... by citizenr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Haha, you really think it was about patents and not about forcing users into uploading everything into Google cloud.

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  5. Re:What about FAT32 by jonbryce · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It covers long filename support in FAT. Digital cameras that stored photos with 8.3 filenames were never affected by this patent regardless of which version of FAT they used.

  6. Re:Licensees should be able to recover their payme by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why? Was the product defective? Was something illegal done? Bernie Madoff's customers deserve restitution. Microsoft's do not. Whether or not the patent is valid, you pay to license the filesystem.

    You would be right if modern patent licensing wasn't a legalized protection racket. The patent is invalid so there was never a product to begin with, only a bunch of men dressed in expensive suits telling you "that is a nice business you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it, either pay up or face years of curt battles with sales bans mixed in". The nearest thing to a product is the promise not to loose your business to a violent death.

  7. Not useful by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the important requirements for a patentable invention is that it must be "useful".

    This patent originally covered a way to provide compatibility between short and long file names. But nobody has used short file names in decades.

    So now, the "feature" continues to be necessary only so that FAT can provide compatibility with itself. That's like begging the question. The feature no longer has any intrinsic usefulness, and in fact just serves to make the file system format more convoluted and less efficient.

    The patent system ought to be changed so that any patent should be revoked once it is no longer useful for its intended purpose. This particular patent has recently been "useful" solely as a way to give Microsoft leverage in the media device market. The covered feature provides zero benefit to end users.

    1. Re:Not useful by ledow · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sorry, but you describe a useful function. Whether it's relevant any more or not is neither here nor there. If I invent a way to make a clockwork mechanism work more efficiently, that's still an invention, still patentable. And, as Trevor Bayliss shows, still something that should be protected by patents even if it's "old hat".

      The real crux of the matter is whether FAT is "obvious to one skilled in the art" which is a much, much, much more relevant and important test of patentability. Fact is, it pretty much is. If you're a filesystem designer and you're handed FAT and told to make it store long file names, FAT LFN's are pretty much one of a million ways to do them - and not even a particularly effective or perfect one.

      Lacking such "inventiveness", and being just something that anyone with half a brain could come up with, AND being in a jurisdiction where software patents shouldn't be allowed by the EU courts anyway, that's what means it should be invalidated. By the same token, BTW, Trevor Bayliss would also fail. What he did wasn't invention, just quite a smart combination of two existing technologies. But at least it was a physical invention and not a way to get Linux-based vendors (e.g. TomTom) to pay Microsoft money for Windows-only inventions.

  8. One-time vs. recurring fee by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The practical problem with "forcing users into uploading everything into Google cloud" is that carriers limit uploads and downloads per month to Google cloud. A lot of people would rather purchase an SD card one time than pay the carrier every month to have access to a larger library while away from Wi-Fi.