Re: German court invalidates FAT patent ..

[Rjack]

Doug Mentohl wrote:
> 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 :)