Microsoft FAT patent fails in Germany

While the U.S. courts recently reaffirmed Microsoft's FAT (File Allocation Table) patents, the German Patent Federal Court has just dismissed the patent for use in Germany.

According to a report in the German news publication Heise Online, the court has denied the protection that the European Patent Office granted to Microsoft under EP 0618540 for a "common namespace for long and short filenames." This was based on Microsoft's US Patent No. 5,758,352. The German Patent Court stated that the patent claims Microsoft made are "not based on inventive activity."


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