The US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected two key Microsoft patent applications relating to its File Allocation Table file system. But Microsoft officials still hold out hope that the company ultimately will succeed in the quest to patent FAT. Open-source vendors are holding their breath.
Wow the implacations of this are huge. Not so much on the FOSS side as with the magnetic media side. imagine having to pay a royalty to MS for using flash media. It is arguable that if you own a Microsoft OS and use it to format a flash drive you would think the license for FAT 16 would transfer.
paying Microsoft royalties is bad enough if you are a camera manufacturer and decide to use FAT on the memory devices.
but, it could exclude all other systems from using fat to access these devices.
thus killing linux/solaris/qnx/macos/macosx/os2,
in fact it would kill ALL non-microsoft opearting systems. Who would use them if you cannot access hardware that needs fat or old files stored on other media ?
Microsoft has never (to my knowledge) sued anyone over patent infringement. Microsoft has patents on a lot of common stuff in today’s computing, but as I said I’ve never heard or read anywhere anyone beeing sued over it. They probably sued a lot of companies or forced them to pay royalties, but they hold a lot of patents that could really hurt (or kill) other software, but I think they won’t do anything about it.
I think the reason for all those patents is not to cast fear on software or their smaller competitors (i.e. Linux), but more pointed towards their biggest rivals IBM, Google, Sun,…
For example, Microsoft hold a patent on “tab browsing” – so you can browse the web using only keyboard (moving around links with TAB). This patent was granted somewhere in 2002/03 (I think) and they’ve taken 0 action against any browser (and pretty much any browser I know has this feature). Even Firefox, what many people consider the biggest threat to IE, has received 0 suits or threats.
For example, Microsoft hold a patent on “tab browsing” – so you can browse the web using only keyboard (moving around links with TAB). This patent was granted somewhere in 2002/03 (I think) and they’ve taken 0 action against any browser (and pretty much any browser I know has this feature). Even Firefox, what many people consider the biggest threat to IE, has received 0 suits or threats.
MS knows the problems this would cause. First of all, Novell and Red Hat would defend their customers against lawsuits, much like they did with SCO. IBM would also defend their customers, like with SCO. Also, could you imagine the bad press this would cause?
They know full well it would get laughed out of court,
any of the older console based browsers would be prior art.
Uhh, I think they’re, like, 20 years late…
Anyways, FAT is so simple it’s ridiculous to try to apply a patent to it. It’s like patenting linked lists.
I completely agree with the “It’s like patenting linked lists”. Good thing they got rejected, good for all hobby OS developers as well since almost everyone of them will have used FAT at one time during development.
“Anyways, FAT is so simple it’s ridiculous to try to apply a patent to it. It’s like patenting linked lists.”
SHUT UP! Don’t give those Redmond meatheads anymore stupid ideas… >:-(
The funny thing is– FAT basically is linked lists of blocks :-O
Just use another filesystem for the devices in question (flash memory cards mainly) and you don’t have to pay for a FAT license.
Start using ext2fs! It’s open source, so it has to be better automagically!
Too bad my digital cameras adn MP3 players don’t read other file systems, or they’d be HPFS in no time. Sure using USB keys for data is fine formatted like that, but other devices atm don’t read other filesystems like that. Hell, even my new digital SLR is a FAT-based device.
“Start using ext2fs!”
Heh. I agree. You might try journaling too. It’s so much better than FAT.
hmmm…I’m sure that would work….except windows doesn’t support ext2.
– Jesse McNelis
I believe this was burned down in court earlier actually.
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Hmm, some searching gave me this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#FAT_licensing
Quite interesting. Basically, the main patent covering FAT with long file names (FAT with short filenames is not patented) was re-examined and rejected.
This must be the results of MS’ appeal effort.
The FAT filesystem was first publicly released with QDOS in 1980 by Seattle Computer Products. I’m not sure that you can patent invention 24 years after the fact, particularly if another company invented it, but especially since the term of the patent coverage is long since past.
There have been some minor variations (tweaking the size of counters and such), but it’s more or less unchanged since the initial implementation. No, I think it goes without saying that it’s not currently patentable.
Although this patent was thankfully rejected, many others similar to it aren’t; and this seems like a pretty good example of why software patents are such a terrible idea. If you want innovation, you need a large field of ideas that can be freely used. Once you start turning that field into little fenced-off paddocks that no one can enter without paying a toll, what do you have left? I truly don’t mean to troll here, firstly because I /don’t/ hate the US, and secondly because I know these issues exist in many other countries, but they do apply particulary to the US: if it continues to allow corporations to legislate away freedoms in an attempt to secure themselves, it’s going to get left behind. This applies particularly in the software sector because it’s fast-moving, and you have a lot of options when starting development. If people can’t get things done in the US, they’ll just avoid it and get things done somewhere else. Unfortunately, it’ll also make things awkward for a lot of people, both in the US, and outside it.
I wonder what the chances are of patent reform in the US any time soon?
Small devices use FAT because it’s absurdly simple. Telling them to switch to ext2 isn’t going to happen. What we need is a BSD licensed filesystem that is absurdly simple as well. In fact, make it public domain for the best adoption rate.
the real purpose of going after the FAT format in flash memory devices is to eliminate the “open source hole”.. the final piece to end-to-end DRM. Right now SD is used primarily as glorified MMC. Few people bother with using encryption or drm on the stuff from their OWN camera. One cruel little thing about SD is that because of the encryption details there can never be legal Linux drivers for it. See where this is headed…
MS sues the camera makers to not use FAT anymore… MS of course licenes NTFS [or something] really cheaply if you stop “violating” the “patent” So the camera makers comply and now only SD cards work… pretty much leaving support to get your pictures off at the vendor’s discression.. if they don’t bother with MAC drivers [they already don’t support Linux] it’s Windows-only guys.
This is why MS is in the position they are in.. the way the US govt works they are penny-wise and pound foolish. There’s no focus on the issue allowing MS to argue their “IP rights” as “infallable” while using it purely for mopolistic purposes… Just being a convicted monopoly, the govt should be able to “stonewall” this just out of principle.. but MS lawyers even have ways of twisting that their advantage.
They don’t use anything other than FAT because any device must be compatible with Windows. Knowing that Windows does only support FAT and NTFS and that the latter is only supported by Windows NT and beyond, it’s clear that, while 90% of the computers run Windows, all the devices will use FAT filesystems.
Microsoft remember those ads you did in australia?
Well your trying to impead progress. Digital world took a hit from MP3. Microsoft have a closer look at what your partners are doing.
SUN MICROSYSTEMS after a long decline in sales and share price SUN has improved the outlook of their future by 100% by doing what they have.
What about SGI they use to be huge now they are still around and noone talks much about them anymore.
Personaly I think microsoft are trying to endup like transmeta.
Consumer confidence is down. I think its time microsoft wake up and see old patents for FAT are now too late.
Lets just all screem patent abuse!!!