Group seeks to invalidate Microsoft patent

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A bit of a strawman

---In my humble opinion, the fact that any royalty fees are
inconsistent with open source or free software is not sufficient
reason to deny Microsofts patent---

A well reasoned argument, but that's not what is being
questioned here. Here are some of the arguments in favor of a
reexamination, from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT

FAT licensing


Although technical details of the FAT file system derive from CP/
M and have been widely known and widely disseminated in the
PC community for many years, and although the file system itself
is widely considered to be obsolete, it should be noted that in
2003 Microsoft made a point of asserting intellectual property
claims to the system. Citing patents, Microsoft claimed that
licensing fees are required for its use in such applications as
removable solid state media, and consumer devices using such
media.

This claim by Microsoft is controversial, for a number of reasons.
Microsoft itself has admitted that it developed its first FAT file
system in 1976, so no patents could apply to an implementation
of the original version. Copyright law could not prevent a re-
implementation of FAT either.

Microsoft has cited 4 patents, dating from 1995 on, for FAT. All
of these patents relate to storing both long and short filenames
in a single file system. A Slashdot discussion on December 4,
2003, analyzed these patents and participants (particularly
Svartalf) reported the following:
Patent 5,579,517 - Common name space for long and short
filenames. Filed for on April 24, 1995. This appears to only
impact someone using a Common Name Space for long and
short filenames. This is the scheme Microsoft deployed for
"Chicago" (the codename of Windows 95 while in development).
This patent is likely to be invalidated (if challenged) by
Microsoft's prior art release of Chicago to the world in December
1993.
Patent 5,745,902 - Method and system for accessing a file using
file names having different file name formats. Filed for on July 6,
1992. This patents allowing renaming of just the name and
preserving the extension for the purposes of keeping track of
the filetype. It is unclear that other implementors would need to
implement this patent to implement a FAT system.
Patent 5,758,352 - Common name space for long and short
filenames. Filed on September 5, 1996. This is extremely similar
to the 5,579,517 Patent; see those comments.
Patent 6,286,013 - Method and system for providing a common
name space for long and short file names in an operating
system. Filed on January 28, 1997. This is a detailed description
of how Windows 95/98/Me handles long filenames on an x86
-32 platform. It is unclear this patent would apply to anything
other than an exact clone of Windows 95/98/Me. This patent is
likely to be invalidated (if challenged) by Microsoft's prior art
release of Windows 95, two years before the filing date,


In addition, there also seems to be prior art for at least the first,
third, and fourth patents in the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol
standard for UNIX, which was an IEEE draft specification on at
least July 13th, 1993. This protocol defined a method to support
long and short names on the same media (as well as additional
information) to support Unix systems.

And of course, there is the simple question if this is really an
innovative idea at all. Patents are supposed to be granted for
new ideas; the notion of not removing short names, but adding
long name information as well, is an option that is immediately
obvious to any practitioner in the field.

In short, many have concluded that these patents only cover
implementations that include support for long filenames, so it
likely that removable solid state media and consumer devices
only using short names would be unaffected. Also, there is good
reason to believe the patents would be found invalid or
unnecessary if challenged. In particular, many or all such patents
are believed by many to be invalid because of previous public
release, prior art, or because the technique would be obvious to
a practitioner.

None of this may impact operating system or firmware
implementations. In the document "Microsoft Extensible
Firmware Initiative FAT 32 File System Specification, FAT:
General Overview of On-Disk Format" by Microsoft (version 1.03,
December 6, 2000), Microsoft specifically grants a number of
rights, and many readers of that document have interpreted it as
permitting operating system vendors to implement FAT.

Posted by: tic swayback   Posted on: 04/16/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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