OIN Posts Details of Microsoft's Anti-Tom Tom Patents

number6x writes "LinuxDevices.com is reporting that the Open Invention Network has posted the details of three of the eight patents used by Microsoft in the Tom Tom suit (which Tom Tom settled last month), asking the community for prior art. These patents cover aspects of the FAT file system. You can find them on Post-Issue.org — see numbers 5579517, 5758352, and 6256642. OIN CEO Keith Bergelt believes that these three patents are of tenuous validity and will probably not survive a review. Bergelt believes that there's a good chance that the USPTO may well invalidate them before the end of the year.

Why didnt TomTom look for this stuff?

[RobertM1968]

I'm curious why TomTom wouldn't have done this work themselves to invalidate Microsoft's claims and avoid any sort of settlement? Couldn't they have stalled this until a determination was made that either the patent was invalid, or that their methods were based on the prior art - just like Microsoft's?

I'm hoping that TomTom just didnt do their homework and someone manages to come up with the info that they did not.

Makes me wonder how much luck this initiative will have - though I am hoping lots.

On another note, I wonder if an effort to invalidate the patents on the basis of "gee, that's obvious" is taking place as well...

Re:Indicative of the brokenness of the system

[Anonymous Coward]

If a few lay-men webanaughts can find prior art in patents that were enough to force a company to settle out of court (for fear of legislation), then clearly the system is so completely broken that I fear it cannot be repaired.

Well, one person saying that there's a good chance that the USPTO may invalidate a patent (or three) is not the same as actually getting the USPTO to invalidate said patent(s). It might happen, or the patents may prove to be claimed too narrowly to be invalidated easily. How broad does a patent covering VFAT have to make it difficult for competitors to interact with VFAT and still be a novel, non-obvious solution?

Here is my question: Why should I spend the money that I get from my 9-5 job to start up a new company if a few lazy lawyers can bring me to court and sue me without having any real legal ground? I might as well not bring innovation to the stage and save myself the hassle.

If you are facing lazy lawyers, then you should be fine. With the money you make marketing your innovations you should be able to hire some hardworking lawyers who can point out to the court that you are being sued without a legal basis. If you aren't able to make money with your innovations, they probably aren't worth that much in the first place and you're unlikely to get sued by anyone.

Re:Why didnt TomTom look for this stuff?

[Lead Butthead]

It becomes really easy to decide to settle such a lawsuit to keep management focused on "job 1", rather than focusing on saving a few pennies per unit by fighting a lawsuit for several years with a very well funded adversary.

Because it invites other to sue you too. IBM could have easily bought SCOX to make their little... 'problem' go away, but it did not. Instead it spent millions to BURY SCOX to let all other know that it will not be intimidated into buying out a plaintiff.

Re:Irony?

[Darkness404]

Now while this may be funny, it actually could work in MS's favour. For example, if they can make a big enough deal about this they can perhaps persuade other, smaller vendors to pay the patent extortion money and when the patent is invalidated it really doesn't matter because MS already has the money.

Not the first challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

These are patents on the VFAT/FAT32 long-file-name kludge. They have been fought by PubPat and found invalid, but the patents were restored upon appeal. Read about it [wikipedia.org] and you'll know why I stick with 8.3 file names on the embedded systems I work with. When lawyers are involved, being in the right is the road to bankruptcy!

Re:prior art

[SlashWombat]

I would have said the same thing. However, I have not bothered to decipher the patents in question, so I could be wrong. Having said that, it should be said that the first versions of MSDOS were effectively clones of CP/M. So much so that it was easy to get CP/M programs running on IBM PC's equiped with v20 processors. (Took myself and another 24 hours to write appropriate code to trap the vector and redirect through the 8086 MSDOS kernel.)