On Wed, 11 Jan 2006, Les Mikesell wrote: > On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 09:58, Roger Heflin wrote: > > > > > > > > It is not a patent for FAT in general. > > > > > > um ... so the concept of supporting longer filenames qualifies > > > as "novel and non-obvious?" really? > > > > > > Apparently the screwball way they did it, yes, they had to come up > > with the method to put things into the already existing > > structures, and I believe it is rather a odd hack, since the > > pre-existing structures only have space for 8+3, how they are > > doing it is a lot different than the way one does it for a > > filesystem designed from the ground up to accept long filenames. > > So the way to protect something is to do it badly the first time and > then add a quirky work-around to fix some of the problems? I don't > think that qualifies as "novel" for Microsoft, though. i'm still confused by this. so ... the basic 8.3 FAT filesystem is not patented. and the concept of long filenames ... well, no problem there either. i imagine a filesystem structure that was originally designed to handle long filenames wouldn't be particularly novel. in that case, the patent seems to apply to (as the respondent above suggests) little more than the ugly hack that added long filenames to FAT 8.3. but if that's the case, and it can be shown that the hack was the obvious way to do it, wouldn't that lose the novelty argument? rday
