The Open Invention Network (OIN), a consortium of companies that have banded together to defend the Linux platform from patent litigation, announced on Tuesday that it has launched an effort to find prior art for Microsoft's FAT patents.
The OIN's new FAT-busting project is a response to a lawsuit that Microsoft settled earlier this year with navigation device maker TomTom. The lawsuit claimed that TomTom's Linux-based products infringe on a number of Microsoft's patents, including several that describe technical attributes of Microsoft's FAT filesystem. TomTom initially fought back by filing a countersuit of its own and by joining the OIN, but eventually agreed to pay a licensing fee and remove the features from its implementation.
Microsoft claims that its lawsuit against TomTom is an isolated incident and that it doesn't have any plans to use the FAT patents to launch a broader assault on Linux. This claim provides little comfort to the Linux community, however, in light of Microsoft's past threats and antagonism over patent issues.
Many in the Linux community believe that the FAT patents are not valid and that they will not withstand further scrutiny. The patents were upheld, however, during a 2006 review by the patent office. The OIN aims to revisit the question of the FAT patents' validity, but this time they want to be armed with a stronger salvo of prior art claims. To that end, the OIN is calling on the public to participate in its Linux Defenders program by reviewing the patents and submitting prior art through the Peer-to-Patent Post Issue website.
"The patent vetting activity offered by the Linux Defenders portal offers a unique opportunity to bring to bear the collective knowledge, passion and ingenuity of the Linux community to better explore the validity of the patents that were the subject of the recent action against TomTom," said OIN CEO Keith Bergelt in a statement. "I encourage active participation from the entire Linux community so that other companies seeking to advance Linux strategies can be better informed about the quality of these patents."
Linux distributor Red Hat's legal team expressed enthusiasm for the OIN's prior art search in a statement of its own. Red Hat hopes that increased scrutiny of the patents will lead to their invalidation and put pressure on Microsoft to provide stronger guarantees that the patents will not be used to target Linux.
"Red Hat is pleased to endorse the growing movement within the free and open source community of gathering prior art to undermine invalid software patents," the company said in a statement. "We're particularly pleased that Open Invention Network's Linux Defenders has now invited scrutiny of the three patents that Microsoft used in the TomTom case to attack open source, as numerous public reports suggest weaknesses in these patents."
Alongside efforts to invalidate the patents, some Linux supporters are also using this as an opportunity to encourage the technology industry to abandon Microsoft's filesystem. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin says that FAT is easy to replace and that the Linux Foundation is available to coordinate a technical effort to assist with the removal of FAT from products.
The OIN's prior art search could help bring clarity to the question of FAT's validity, but it's not entirely clear yet whether the effort will be able to successfully undermine the patents. Those who wish to participate in the effort can do so by submitting prior art on any of the three FAT patents.
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