Microsoft FAT patent void in .de: ''not based on inventive activity''

[Andy Green]

''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