German court invalidates FAT patent ..

[Rjack]

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."
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/86141

From the heise article:

"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."

This argument applies to 99% of the software related patents granted
by the U.S.P.T.O. The only creativity demonstrated in justifying the
award of a monopoly on these software related ideas is in the
tortured legal language describing simple methods in highly complex
ways.

Unlike copyright protection, I have concluded that any benefits to
technological advancement induced by software patents are vastly
overshadowed by their ability to stifle innovation. They should be
eliminated. It is not within the scope and purpose of a public
software license to do so. The United States Congress should be
urged to ban them.

Sincerely,
Rjack :)

[Alexander Terekhov]

Post by Rjack

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."
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/86141

"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."
This argument ...

The actual arguments (as seen by the court) and the decision can be
inspected here:

http://juris.bundespatentgericht.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/document.py?Gericht=bpatg&Art=en&Datum=2006&Sort=3&Seite=9&nr=1659&pos=287&anz=1651&Blank=1.pdf

Interesting reading!

--
http://gng.z505.com/index.htm
(GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can
be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards
too, whereas GNU cannot.)

[AES]

Post by Rjack

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/86141

"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."
This argument applies to 99% of the software related patents granted
by the U.S.P.T.O. The only creativity demonstrated in justifying the
award of a monopoly on these software related ideas is in the
tortured legal language describing simple methods in highly complex
ways.
Unlike copyright protection, I have concluded that any benefits to
technological advancement induced by software patents are vastly
overshadowed by their ability to stifle innovation. They should be
eliminated. It is not within the scope and purpose of a public
software license to do so. The United States Congress should be
urged to ban them.

I have no views or opinions on the "open software" debates that I
believe are behind this post; but I have a lot of experience with
patents, and I believe that truer words than the above would be very
hard to find.

In fact you could take out all the "software" and "software related"
words in the above, and the basic assertions would be almost equally
true.