German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H) [LWN.net]

The H reports that Microsoft's FAT patent has been upheld in a German appeals court, and is thus, it seems, valid in Germany. "In judgement number X ZR 27/07, handed down on Tuesday, the tenth civil division of the Karlsruhe-based court confirmed the enforceability of the company's commercial rights in Germany. It has not yet published its reasoning, but has confirmed the decision in a short press release."

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German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

Posted Apr 23, 2010 18:32 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (2 responses)

Many Europeans seem to think that software patents are a purely American problem. This should disabuse them of that notion.

Flames to appear here

Posted Apr 23, 2010 21:36 UTC (Fri) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

Dude, I hope you have your asbestos underwear on!

German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

Posted Apr 24, 2010 16:45 UTC (Sat) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

Software patents are AFAIK a reality in Europe for a while already: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/12/15/german_court_rule...

documenting it on http://en.swpat.org/

Posted Apr 24, 2010 0:04 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm going to be documenting this on en.swpat.org. All help welcome.

I can't read German, so German speakers might be particularly helpful.

documenting it on http://en.swpat.org/

Posted Apr 24, 2010 20:48 UTC (Sat) by hjkoch (guest, #45353) [Link]

One of the most important German IT publishers is Heise online, they've got an English version of their article about this:
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/German-appeal-cour...

German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

Posted Apr 24, 2010 7:45 UTC (Sat) by kunitz (subscriber, #3965) [Link]

I read the press release. It doesn't mention the issue of software patents as such, but only whether the patent teaches something new.

The court came to the conclusion that it teaches something new, because the ISO-9660 rock-ridge extension stores the long and short file name in the same directory entry and FAT stores it in two entries. The decision was based on a subject matter expert statement. For technical issues German courts name a subject matter expert and the judgement depends mainly on the opinion of the expert. There is nothing more, the court will publish a reasoning of the decision and we might learn more reading it.

If it mentions the software patentability issue I expect the court to say, that it hadn't the task to look on this, but only to verify whether the judgement of the lower court that the patent doesn't teach anything new was correct.

German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

Posted Apr 24, 2010 10:00 UTC (Sat) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link] (12 responses)

Well this is exactly what you come to expect from the Country that brought you (bollox wagons) (baverian much wipers) and jerkadies

Please

Posted Apr 24, 2010 15:08 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (8 responses)

This kind of thing seems not very helpful; I'd sure like to see less of it on LWN. Any chance you could hold off next time?

Thanks.

Please

Posted Apr 24, 2010 16:32 UTC (Sat) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (3 responses)

Jon, you have the power to see less of that on LWN. You could remove offensive, off-topic, bigoted comments.

Please

Posted Apr 24, 2010 17:35 UTC (Sat) by DOT (subscriber, #58786) [Link] (2 responses)

That wouldn't prevent a future case, and would look like censorship. Denouncing a statement and asking someone to stop works much better. (If that fails though...)

Please

Posted Apr 26, 2010 9:36 UTC (Mon) by lmartelli (subscriber, #11755) [Link] (1 responses)

I would rather call it moderation. It's not necessary to delete moderated comments. They could be kept on a separate "moderated comments" page, so that everybody could see them and approve the moderation (or not). This wat, it would not be censorship.

Please

Posted Apr 26, 2010 9:37 UTC (Mon) by lmartelli (subscriber, #11755) [Link]

s/wat/way/

Please

Posted Apr 24, 2010 19:02 UTC (Sat) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]

Jon, can I please have a "Plonk" button?

Please

Posted Apr 24, 2010 20:38 UTC (Sat) by biged (guest, #50106) [Link] (2 responses)

Jon, would you consider (editorially) flagging the accounts of people who indulge in flames or inappropriate comments? Then a subscriber could choose not to see the comments of flagged accounts. The flag could last for a week or two.

Elsewhere I've seen downvoted comments styled as grey - they fade out. (Better than drawing attention to them, and more public than a killfile approach.)

(I'm not suggesting a voting system, just an editorial control. I realise it's some programming effort, and I realise you don't want to find yourself working as a censor. But it's a way for the site to advertise its integrity.)

Please

Posted Apr 24, 2010 20:46 UTC (Sat) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link]

I think here the guy was not even a subscriber... maybe he got lost following a link and thought he was on i8u://i-can-be-xenophobic-and-stupid.net/let-it-all-out.php

Please

Posted Apr 24, 2010 22:52 UTC (Sat) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Nah, the police-policed model doesn't work as promised. The community model of talking to each other like humans actually works better (as well as being friendlier).

German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

Posted Apr 26, 2010 12:07 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]

If a court is asked a specific question, it has to answer that, period. Go over to Groklaw (or a number of other law-oriented sites about the US system for that matter) and you will see exactly the same pattern.

German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

Posted Apr 29, 2010 14:24 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (1 responses)

Could you please a bit more forthcoming and insult us Germans at least with words that *one can find in a dictionary*? Using parenthesis according to basic English grammar might help understandibility as well. Look, one needs to understand your rant if you want to provoke.

Sigh. So are the times, not even good flames nowadays.

And now get off my lawn.

German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

Posted May 8, 2010 17:52 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Don't worry, I'm English as they come and I can't figure out what on earth his insults are meant to mean either. I suspect he thinks the Second World War never ended (while, if he's using mobile broadband, probably connecting to the net via a multinational telecommunications provider that started in Germany).

German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

Posted Apr 25, 2010 15:41 UTC (Sun) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link] (2 responses)

To go back on topic, I truly hope that work on UDF is revived at this point, since this would provide a truly cross-platform FS. If I am correct, mkudf is more or less there, but what truly prevents people from adoption of UDF on rw media is the lack of a file system check and repair utility in case something goes wrong. Is there any new whether udftools is coming back from orphanage (http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/fedora-extras-list@... and http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org/wiki/Linux-udf)?

German appeal court upholds Microsoft FAT patent (The H)

Posted Apr 25, 2010 16:39 UTC (Sun) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

Since I am using UDF only for file transfer, not for storage (for storage I would simply use btrfs or ext4), I have no real need for any kind of fsck; I can simply run mkudffs again.

UDF FTW

Posted May 6, 2010 17:30 UTC (Thu) by Epicanis (guest, #62805) [Link]

I was quite annoyed to find my shiny new Linux-based Android phone did NOT support UDF. I was hoping to switch to UDF rather than patent-choked FAT for my cards.

I imagine one could simply recompile the Android kernel to support UDF, but from the messages I saw it appears that Android is possibly hard-coded to assume that the sdcard will always be Microsoft FAT format and will error out if that is not the case. (The Android kernel on my phone claims to support ext2 at least, but it still fails to mount ext2-formatted sdcards, giving me some kind of complaint about the FAT filesystem checker failing when trying to read the card...)

Dear Google: Please save us! optional UDF support in addition to FAT would be helpful...

Since every modern OS can read and write UDF just fine (I'm not counting XP as "modern", but even XP can at least READ UDF), and is suppposed to be POSIX compliant, it seems like a much better option for non-Windows devices...