LWN: Comments on "Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)"

Since Linux's algorithm for generating short names differs,

leonbrooks — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 15:15:36 +0000

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.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld; freedom infringed

giraffedata — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:55:20 +0000

It's an interesting phenomenon that "Freedom" is so often held up as a core value by the United States, and yet it seems to be paradoxically infringed by the institutions charged with upholding that freedom.

The paradox is much more basic: one man's freedom is another man's bondage. In almost all cases, when you give one person freedom, you take away freedom from someone else.

The FAT patent enforces a freedom of Microsoft to invent things and sell them. Microsoft is a legal metaphor for the various individuals who own stock in Microsoft. The US is very big on protecting business freedoms where they conflict with more personal freedoms; i.e. to best appreciate the freedom that is a core value in US society, you should go into business.

Not that I think their political system would be truly capable of expressing the will of the common man. The dollar has too much influence.

I happen to believe that the dollar does a pretty good job of expressing the will of the common man. In the US, dollars all ultimately come from the common man, and he has quite a bit of say over where they go.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

giraffedata — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 16:37:13 +0000

patents have strayed from their original intention to now be more about manipulation, control and extortion (what I like to refer to as MCE or MC&E) than the mere protection of a creation from being unjustly usurped by someone else and their failure to give rightful attribution.

You're apparently saying that said protection is the original intention of patents. It isn't. The original intention of patents is to get inventors to tell the public what they invented. This is evident in the word, which is latin for "lying open," and can also be seen in the usage, "that statement is patently false." Without patents, an inventor often has the option of protecting his IP by trade secret instead. That hurts the public, because other people can't build on the invention and if the inventor dies, the public loses the invention completely. The patent says, "in exchange for you publicizing how your invention works, the public agrees to let you have exclusive benefit from it for N years."

Another early (but later) inention was to encourage people to invent. It costs money to invent. If a competitor can get the same invention for free just by waiting for you to invent it, you can't possibly get your money back, so you won't bother.

The idea that it's unjust to usurp someone's creation or tell people it's yours was never thought worthy of legal protection.

In any case, it's true that a very large number of patents now do not support either of those early intentions. They merely exploit a side effect of patent law.

Prior Art?

wookey — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 15:59:47 +0000

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.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

Ross — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 09:34:06 +0000

But it's still possible to use 8.3 filenames on FAT32, right? Or do the patents cover both the long filename extensions and the larger filesystem extensions? It seems like the latter are completely obvious given the move from FAT12 to FAT16.

Prior Art?

khim — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 05:32:15 +0000

Default Zaurus SL-C860 kernel does not support FAT32. Yet I'm able to use 4GB flash formatted as FAT16 there - full size no paritions and/or other tricks.

Now I know that my 4GB card is smaller then 64MB... Hmmm... Strange arithmetic...

How is FAT32 patentable?

leonbrooks — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 23:37:58 +0000

If it's just the long-filenames part which presents a problem, then that's not a big issue. It should be relatively easy to produce a stupid-patent-compliant large-FAT driver for Linux.

I'm still not clear on how VFAT could possibly be patentable, though. The techniques used existed in VFAT are just riddled with prior art.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

CyberTrekker — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 20:33:23 +0000

Aside from the other issues you mentioned in your post in response to the
main article, I wholeheartedly agree with you that patents have strayed
from their original intention to now be more about manipulation, control
and extortion (what I like to refer to as MCE or MC&E) than the mere
protection of a creation from being unjustly usurped by someone else and
their failure to give rightful attribution.

In my considered opinion, copyright too has taken this route.

So-called intellectual property (IP) has itself become a system of that
manipulation, control and extortion.

It is indeed a sad world. It is a world wherein humans think they actually
own the fruits of their intellectual and physical labour to the point of
claiming unnatural rights over them and exerting undue influence through
the irrational process of MCE.

Patent reference

ayeomans — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 16:37:01 +0000

Microsoft's FAT technology license refers in addition to patent US-5,579,517 the two patents US-5,758,352 and US-6,286,013. All refer to long filenames. Though as far as I can tell (corrections welcome!) the latter two have not been challenged by PubPat or anyone else, so presumably are not part of the current ruling.

Patent reference

ayeomans — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 16:27:24 +0000

As far as I can tell from PubPat's challenge details there is only one patent in question, US-5,579,517. I guess the "two patents" refer to two of the four claims in this patent. The patent abstract states:

An operating system provides a common name space for both long filenames and short filenames. In this common namespace, a long filename and a short filename are provided for each file. Each file has a short filename directory entry and may have at least one long filename directory entry associated with it. The number of long filename directory entries that are associated with a file depends on the number of characters in the long filename of the file. The long filename directory entries are configured to minimize compatibility problems with existing installed program bases.

Prior Art?

Soruk — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 16:21:43 +0000

Why should flash memory > 64MB require FAT32? We had hard discs far bigger than that long before Win95OSR2 came out. Indeed my camera uses FAT16 on 128MB flash cards.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

beejaybee — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 07:44:53 +0000

"Digital cameras (SFAIK) all use original FAT (well, the 16-bit version) with 8.3 names."

No. Most top-end cameras now support FAT32 as well. Essentially this support is required to cope with flash cards bigger than 2GB - given that professionals and advanced amateurs almost invariably store images in either RAW or TIFF format, 2 GBytes is equivalent in storage to only about one roll of 35mm film.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

rqosa — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 06:07:42 +0000

> FAT32 (VFAT)

Actually, VFAT and FAT32 are two different things.

Prior Art?

patmartini — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 04:41:04 +0000

Hello. I too was in the industry then, actually since the 70's. I
remember Coherent. Prior to that I worked with Digital Research, the CP/M
people, and was involved back then (in the pre-Windows era) with an
extended file system format. In fact, the extended architecture actually
began there (migrating into CP/M 86 [later MS-DOS 1.1]). The vfat system
was an extension to the original FAT (later known as FAT16) system,
introduced by MS with W95. This still used 16 bit addressing, capable of
up to 64 megabytes. W95 Second Edition brought FAT32, a further extension
of the vfat system which actually uses 28 address bits (can reach
gigabytes). The other 4 bits were reserved for the long filename support.
This is actually what is still in use today.

This is the crux of the patent point. Gates and company only do things
with dollar signs, and thus, the big targets for this are the memory and
USB-based manufacturers. Flash memory larger than 64 megabytes obviously
require the 28 bit addressing. The long file name is a non-essential
bonus. The secondary target of any patent infringement litigation from
Microsoft will be the Unix/Linux guys, who incorporate FAT32 addressing
read/write capabilities in their operating systems. This obviously forms
a common bridge (a common directory structure) which Gates would like to
see go away. I wonder if this has something to do with Apple's planned
Unix departure.

I know personally that this is a thorn in the Redmond side - dual boot.
They will attack anyone who treads on their preiminent dominance. There
have alreay been several NTFS lawsuits (mainly concerned with writing)
which were the result of reverse engineering. This is why we do not see
NTFS write capability in Unix/Linux. I know Gates, and he will stop at
nothing to satisfy his 'rule the world' attitude (remember Netscape?).

An aside here, I was really upset with them (MS) over the Netscape thing,
but didn't feel as bad when I heard that AOL bought all Netscape assets
for a cool 4.5 Billion (Andreessen and Clark cashed-in big time)! While
the world suffered at the hands of underhanded and illegal MS business
practices, the Netscape guys reaped a huge payoff, thanks to Gates.

I don't think there will be any secondary winners this time, however, as
a shutdown on a common 28 bit addressing scheme will very seriously
impact the industry. I agree with a former comment here about a new,
unified, open standard, but I don't think you will see this real soon on
a Windows box. It's too bad the rest of the industry is so splintered and
separate - a united effort would put some serious (needed) brakes on
Gates & co.

Prior Art?

neoprene — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 01:24:40 +0000

And you thought M$ never had an original idea?
Prior Art to these lazy monkeys means [searchable] Patents.
If the Prior Art is not commonly known, and well published, like in the form of a Patent, these morons want to understand it to mean that the idea does not [did not] exist.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

bk — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 01:17:21 +0000

That's fine, but I don't think pure hardware devices like thumb drives would be infringing. If the patents only cover long-filename creation or access, thumbdrives don't themselves create or use filenames, they simply export a block device.

Likewise, only the software portions of devices like digital cameras or music players would be subject to royalty or licensing fees.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

wookey — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:38:52 +0000

Yes, but they don't use the patents, which all refer to long filenames. Digital cameras (SFAIK) all use original FAT (well, the 16-bit version) with 8.3 names.

It's only long filename extensions we need to worry about (and in fact their mappings back to unique 8.3 names).

It does mean that the Linux VFAT implmentation is presumably infringing (which is of course a bloody stupid state of affairs). We wrote it all ourselves for the purpose of interoperability. In a reasonable world that could never be illegal.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

Mithrandir — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 00:06:14 +0000

It's an interesting phenomenon that "Freedom" is so often held up as a core value by the United States, and yet it seems to be paradoxically infringed by the institutions charged with upholding that freedom. The United States has always been happy to infringe on the freedom of other nationals (its foreign policy record over the last few decades speaks for itself), but it's interesting how much it has been chipping away at the freedom of its own citicens recently.

Everyone seems to notice this except the American voter. Not that I think their political system would be truly capable of expressing the will of the common man. The dollar has to much influence.

Recently on local radio I heard a report about an Internation Living Quality of Life index:

http://www.internationalliving.com/media/archived_pages
and http://www.internationalliving.com/qol06

The United States falls from the top position it held in this index for 21 years in a row, to take seventh place this year. The United States remains, inarguably, the worlds most convenient place to live. But, International Living is convinced that convenience is not the most important factor in determining any countrys quality of life. Its economic performance over the past year has slowed slightly, but more than that it is the ongoing and increasing infringements of personal freedoms that account primarily for its fall from first place.

This opens a legal can of worms

leonbrooks — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:50:23 +0000

The GPL, under which Linux is distributed, specifies that if code cannot be distributed without an appropriate grant of rights from a patent holder, then it cannot be distributed. So the VFAT code can't be distributed... in the USA.

The rest of the world hasn't (yet) demonstrated such stupidity, so the VFAT code can be distributed there (here).

Which leaves the GPL... where?

Since most cameras etc only use 8.3 filenames, and the whole point of the way VFAT works is to make a system compatible with the 8.3 days, this won't have as big an impact as fear might suggest. However, it is still a pain in the ass.

The other thing to consider is who the patent has been granted to. I would have thought that their position as a convicted monopolist would have made the USPTO extremely reluctant to grant any more monopoly power to Microsoft.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

sbergman27 — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:46:16 +0000

Expect RedHat/Fedora to cave in by 11/15/06. Quite possibly sooner.

Yes, Linux implements it

leonbrooks — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:43:39 +0000

Linux reads such filesystems. Its techniques for inventing the names when writing to them are a bit cleverer than Microsoft's.

Perhaps more importantly, a system known as umsdos did pretty much the same thing (metadata in hidden files), starting a fair bit earlier than VFAT ever did. There was a later edition (which never made release) called "UVFAT" which was a UMSDOS-over-VFAT implementation. There are also systems like Rock Ridge and Joliet for doing the same thing on ISO-9660 (CD-R) filesystems. It could also be argued that Apple's filesystems ("DATA fork" and so on) are simply a more generalised form of the same technique.

Only a lawyer could believe that there was anything truly patentable in VFAT.

Prior Art?

filker0 — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:49:37 +0000

Back in the late 1980s, I worked for a company that produced (among other things) a Unix like OS (Coherent) and C compilers/cross-compilers for various systems (MS-DOS, TOS, Coherent, ...). We supported long symbol names in object files in much the same way that VFAT supports long file names -- there was a short entry in the symbol table that contained a short (truncated/mangled) name and all of the information that was associated with the symbol followed by another entry that contained the long name and a different type that associated the long name with the previous (short) entry. Tools that supported the long names knew how to interpret the extended entries, those that did not handle long names ignored the extended entries and simply used the short names.

I don't know who came up with the scheme, but it was well established before 1986 (when I went to work at MWC). In many ways, this is pretty much the same thing that MS has done in VFAT, using dual entries, one backward compatible with the actual file pointer info, the other with the extended name. MS was certainly aware of this technique, as MWC was a leading vendor of C compilers for MS-DOS for many years before MS entered that market with Quick-C.

Even if this is not exactly the same technique (due to the name mangling for the short names), it's pretty darn close.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

mgh — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:17:12 +0000

I don't think that people have grasped the seriousness of this outcome. I believe losing FAT32 (VFAT) support from Linux would be a major problem. Microsoft doesn't need to move against any of the Linux vendors in a legal sense, the ability of MS sales to say "We can move legally against Linux any time we like - do you really want to trust your business to an illegal operating system" will be more than enough to have any large business legal department shift its feet nervously and have a quiet word to CIOs.

Yes, network file systems limit this to some extent, however proving that patents will be accepted for exsiting technology, even if its been in the market place for years, is such an astounding precedent that how can anyone imagine that SMB/CIFS is not in the process of being patented right now?

I don't doubt for one second that we are witnessing is the granting of legal monopolies through the use of patents. This is the death of competition and any kind of freedom. Its ironic that the US often holds up "freedom" as its ace card, yet it has to be one of the least free and most regulated markets in the world. Its a transparent strategy to incorporate these conditions into trade agreements and hence bind the world market to US led legislation.

The only bright card on the horizon here is that this outcome has to make open formats for any public document an absolute must and this decision will be a significant boost to these causes.

It has always suprised me that ext2/3 and friends are not available as simple, stable drivers for Win32 platforms... This combined with growth in acceptance and installation by vendors would somewhat neutralise this threat.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

NAR — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:30:47 +0000

Isn't RedHat selling operating systems that can read pictures from a digital camera? Isn't RedHat paying Linux kernel developers? Isn't it a strong enough case?

Bye,NAR

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

HenrikH — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:25:09 +0000

You mean like this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd ?

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

proski — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:06:59 +0000

Targeting Linux developers would make it a weak case. It would be hard to prove that anyone of them profits from the use of the patented technology. IANAL

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

Ross — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:58:14 +0000

Ok, so this makes sense and it sounds more like what I had heard before. What they have patented is VFAT. So if someone created an algorithm that somehow worked with other VFAT implementations, but was useless on systems reading the names as 8.3, they would be able to get around the patent?

And for many companies, as the other poster points out, they can just avoid creating any long filenames (and only read the short names if ones are created elsewhere) and avoid the whole problem.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

JoeBuck — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:32:21 +0000

Check the patent numbers and read the claims. All three of the patents are about long file names and the compatibility schemes to allow older systems to see mangled 8.3 filenames.

The older MS-DOS version of FAT is not patented; as you say, it's 30 years old.

Microsoft is being coy about the distinction, probably so they can collect from digital camera makers who can't possibly be infringing (because they use only 8.3 filenames like IMG_3031.JPG).

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

petegn — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:18:59 +0000

well you never know the US Patent office might get it right one of these days and Patent themselfs as a bunch of bungeling bafoons who aint got the first idea (whats new) sounds much like MS themselfs ..

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

AnswerGuy — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:15:43 +0000

I suspect that MS is trying to assert newer patent claims on some of the more recent changes to FAT, such as the innovation of using weird volume label directory entries as the long filename information. (That's how VFAT supports long filenames and links, by interlacing "volume labels" among the short filenanmes in the directories).

Those date back about 10 years now (ISTR they were first supported around Win '95 or so). That would give MS another 7 years to leach money out of companies like Lexar (and all your USB thumb drive, compact flash, and digitial camera manufacturers that use FAT ad their de facto standard FS.

The Linux community could capitalize on MS' greediness by helping to produce a set of libraries/DLLs and drivers/VXDs that provide MS Windows systems with access to ext2 or even Minix filesystems. These would be supported under Linux, of course --- but also freely available to the various manufacturers who could ship the community supplied and maintained drivers and libraries with their products to their customers.

JimD

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

zooko — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 17:09:12 +0000

Don't forget that patents are of limited duration. FAT itself was invented in the early 80's at the latest, so it cannot be covered by patents.

One news article I saw pointed to a patent that was granted in 1996 about truncating long filenames and putting ~1, ~2, etc. so that you can lookup the files while using an 8.3-limited filesystem. Does Linux even implement that feature?

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

sdenlinger — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:59:10 +0000

But the U.S. Patent Office has just ruled that Microsoft's claim to the patent on FAT is indeed valid. I am not an attorney, but what stronger case could Microsoft hope to wait for before deciding to take someone to court for violating its patent?

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

Ross — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:58:50 +0000

FAT is close to 30 years old now. How can it be under patent?

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

proski — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:52:29 +0000

It's very unlikely. Microsoft would have to threaten Linux developers with a lawsuit. For a company convicted of abusing its monopoly, suing its principal competitor without having a strong case would be a PR disaster.

Microsoft's file system patent upheld (News.com)

rknop — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 16:17:39 +0000

Doh. Does this mean that MSDOS filesystem compatability will drift out of the Linux filesystem?

I think that the DOS filesystem being the universal standard is not a good thing. On the other hand, it's what we're stuck with. It will make it painful for anybody who wants to use a flash reader or flash drive if Linux can't support the vfat filesystem directly any more.

The whole patent process seems to be contrary to the original justification for having patents in the first place. What a sad world.

-Rob