Prior Art?

Posted Jan 13, 2006 15:59 UTC (Fri) by wookey (guest, #5501)
In reply to: Prior Art? by filker0
Parent article: Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

I haven't actually read the patents in detail, and IANAL, but the problem here is the 'not exactly the same technique'. In patent-lawyer-land the very similar technique you describe will be deemed 'not exactly the same' and thus not valid prior art. Unless you can find a document describing this filesystem which _also_ refers to a similar technique for generating the short names from the long names than you will probably lose the case, because the rules for 'invalidating prior art' are astonishingly strict.

The name-mapping invention described in the patent will remain sufficient to declare it an invention worthy of 20 years exclusive protection, even though we can all see that 90% of it had been done before and the mapping algorithm was hardly a work of overweening genius.

The system is impressively broken, and it's difficult to see how to fix it.

Since Linux's algorithm for generating short names differs,

Posted Jan 15, 2006 15:15 UTC (Sun) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link]

does that imply that the patent doesn’t touch our implementation?

IIRC (and that’s a long range recall), our implementation doesn’t use the braindead blah~N notation, but guesses more reasonable abbreviations. It would, OTOH, read the blah~N stupidity just as well as its own names (and so would Microsoft's implementation read ours). So is that an implementation of the stupid patent or not?

If it is, then I reckon that we can argue for UMSDOS being prior art for the process. If it isn’t, then the problem goes away.

Goes away for everyone, that is, since other OSes can simply write their own name-guessing algorithms to avoid paying Mr Patent Farmer his “protection” money.