On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 11:33 +1100, James wrote: > On 3/1/07, Hussam Al-Tayeb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Not only Linux is affected by the FAT patent. You have a lot of > > manufacturers who ship Usb drives or Cameras that use FAT filesystem for > > storage (where internal storage parts are freformatted as FAT). > > I think that would be considered fair use, those companies aren't > actually writing products to implement fat, they'd just be formatting > it with microsoft's utilities. They don't make the profit of 'fat' > anyway.
There's no "fair use" concept in patent law. It's not like copyright law in that respect, where you can, for example, quote from a book in the course of a published review of that book without the copyright holder's permission. With patents, you are either infringing or you're not. Patent holders are certainly free to allow whatever uses they want without requiring payment, just as copyright holders are free to license their work under the GPL or a Creative Commons license. Fraunhofer & Thompson for a long time allowed mp3 decoding without a license and without requiring payment, while they charged for encoding. Microsoft for a long time made no payment demands for using FAT on hardware. But that doesn't mean they can't change their minds and start demanding payment going forward. There's no fair use defense against that decision -- your options are either to stop using the patented technology, pay up, or challenge the validity of the patent in court. That's the danger of relying on patented tech or methods. You are entirely at the mercy of the patent holder. > I don't think that this novel showusthecode idea will get far. > Microsoft could quite well just completely ignore it. It's that > simple. There's no onus on them to reply. And in that case, it may > well end up just being forgotten. I agree. -- Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." --S. Jackson _______________________________________________ arch mailing list [email protected] http://www.archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch
