Microsoft wins FAT patent appeal

Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on January 11, 2006

In an appeal in which other industry players were not permitted to present their case, Microsoft have had the United States Patent and Trademark Office's rejection of their File Allocation Table (FAT) file system patents overturned.

If upheld in the courts (which seems unlike to me), this could require the removal of FAT compatibility from Linux and the BSD operating systems.

From a technical point of view, the embarrassing thing is that the FAT family of filesystems are based on 1970s technology, there exist far, far better filesystems ("better" largely depending on exactly what you want to use them for), but because Microsoft doesn't ship drivers for those file systems, they can't gain market share. The newer filesystems are variously faster (because they lay out the data more intelligently), more secure (because they store owner, permissions and access information), support larger partitions and files, more robust (particularly in the case of users removing the drive while data is being written) or some combination of the above.

Coverage at news.com.com.

6708 | intellectual property rights

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		Microsoft wins FAT patent appeal Created by Stuart Yeates (University of Oxford) on January 11, 2006 In an appeal in which other industry players were not permitted to present their case, Microsoft have had the United States Patent and Trademark Office's rejection of their File Allocation Table (FAT) file system patents overturned. If upheld in the courts (which seems unlike to me), this could require the removal of FAT compatibility from Linux and the BSD operating systems. From a technical point of view, the embarrassing thing is that the FAT family of filesystems are based on 1970s technology, there exist far, far better filesystems ("better" largely depending on exactly what you want to use them for), but because Microsoft doesn't ship drivers for those file systems, they can't gain market share. The newer filesystems are variously faster (because they lay out the data more intelligently), more secure (because they store owner, permissions and access information), support larger partitions and files, more robust (particularly in the case of users removing the drive while data is being written) or some combination of the above. Coverage at news.com.com. 6708 \| intellectual property rights Stuart's blog Login or register to post comments 3716 reads
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