On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 09:30:20AM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > When all of the pieces are public how can having secret veiled reasons > make sense? Because knowingly violating a patent triples the damages, among other things. There's a persistent rumor that a valid microsoft US software patent exists that covers the standard method of handling long file names on FAT filesystems. It seems that such a patent is used by microsoft in litigations, the latest being against tomtom. I think all of these litigations have been settled, but I can easily be wrong. I have no idea whether such a patent actually exists, and even knowing the reference (I don't) I am not competent to judge what it covers or whether it would actually hold up in court. But knowingly violating a patent is consider way worse in US courts than simple independant recreation. So I guess the knowingly part is what the "you need a local lawyer" crowd tries to avoid. OG. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
