Ouch!

[John Wendel]

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> 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
> 

You're thinking like a rational being. Forget it, this is something 
from the world of lawyers, rational thought does not apply.

Regards,

John