''Federal Patent Court declares FAT patent of Microsoft null and void
The Federal Patent Court has declared a Microsoft patent on the file
allocation system File Allocation Table (FAT) invalid for the Federal
Republic of Germany. The claim in question is the protection claim
granted by the European Patent Office under EP 0618540 for a "common
namespace for long and short filenames." This in turn is based on the US
patent No. 5,758,352. At the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (GPTO)
the patent is protected under DE 69429378. According to a recently
published decision (PDF file) by the 2nd Division of the Federal Patent
Court bearing the file number: 2Ni 2/05 (EU) and dated October 26, 2006
the claims made are "not based on inventive activity."
Critics of the FAT patents (which include the US patent No. 5,579,517)
have for a long time now assumed that the company from Redmond is
thereby trying to lay claim to basic computing procedures that in the
final analysis are trivial. The plaintiff in the action before the
Federal Patent Court had argued that the subject matter of the
challenged patent was prior art or if not prior art per se could be
easily deduced by a specialist at least from prior art. In addition the
patent claims had, in the opinion of the plaintiff, neither been
sufficiently clearly defined nor revealed in their entirety. Moreover
the claims pointed beyond the content of the very first application
filed for the patent in question, the plaintiff stated. To support his
accusations the plaintiff referred to among other things the first
version (dated July 24, 1991) of the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol
(RRIP) on reading files from CD-ROMs and to contributions to the
newsgroups comp.unix.bsd and comp.os.linux published on December 12, 1992.
...''
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/86141
Innovation! Innovation!
-Andy
