Brookings Conference on Software and Business Method Patents Highlights Need for Reform (Red Hat News) [LWN.net]

Red Hat News has a posting from Rob Tiller, VP and assistant general counsel for IP, about a recent conference on software and business method patents. "Some of the harm from software patents is obvious. Do they provide any compensating benefit? There was little, if any, evidence that they encourage innovation. Although the number of software patents has exploded in recent years, one panelist expressed doubt that success in the technology area was associated with patent ownership. He observed that had the young Bill Gates been confronted at the outset with the litigation risks of tens of thousands of software patents, he might have chosen to exercise his entrepreneurial skills in a field other than software. The point, of course, is that the current system to some extent discourages innovation and entrepreneurship a travesty of its intended purpose." (thanks to Rahul Sundaram)

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Bill Gates, inventions?

Posted Jan 20, 2009 11:04 UTC (Tue) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

Well, when arguing with laymen, you can talk about Bill Gates and his startup 25 years ago, but innovation? What kind of things had Microsoft invented in the first decade? BASIC? MS-DOS? That weren't inventions back then, but today, there are still valid patents on the FAT file system, a file system that was retarded even back then. And I don't think that Bill Gates would have problems violating a lot of patents - just like he didn't have problems with copyright violations and anti-competitive laws.

Bill Gates, inventions?

Posted Jan 21, 2009 0:17 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

There are no patents that cover the original FAT, with the 8+3 filename limitation. The patents cover the encoding of long filenames.

Bill Gates, inventions?

Posted Jan 21, 2009 14:49 UTC (Wed) by etienne_lorrain@yahoo.fr (guest, #38022) [Link]

> The patents cover the encoding of long filenames.

The patent is probably about "the encoding of long filenames", but the only description of the encoding of long filenames written by Microsoft that I have ever read (I have only seen one single document covering that subject) was false and misleading - I had to completely reverse engineer.
I do not know if I ever read "the right patent", but I have never seen a text "method describing the encoding of long filenames into 8+3" which did explain their implementation.