Re: FAT patents. Do we need to revive non-US?
Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 12:41:57 -0600
Mike McCarty <mike.mccarty@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
Which Patent? What is the date?
Stolen from Cnet talkback posting:
Thanks for the reply.
According to http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/ip/tech/fat.asp they are
talking about 3 Patents U.S. Patent #5,579,517,
This is not strictly FAT. This patent refers to modifications
to the directory entry structure to permit long file names (LFNs)
in them. So, it is a patent on an improvement(?) to the FAT
file system. This would not preclude continuing to use FAT.
U.S. Patent #5,758,352,
Ditto...
U.S. Patent #6,286,013
Ditto... (this is the API used in DOS extensions)
IANAL, but I guess that the third patent does not affect Linux
in any way at all (except possibly DOSBOX or DOSEMU). The first
two would only affect the support for LFNs in the manner used
on Windows. They do not seem to affect FAT support at all, only
the extensions to FAT for LFNs.
they are dated 1996, 1998 and 2001 respectively. I'm too lazy to read
them, but here are the links
Thanks!
[snip]
Mike
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