Reply to post: Re: Bet it won't apply

Re: Bet it won't apply

> I can't wait for the end of Microsoft's income from Android.

That will come when their patents expire

> I can't believe that so many dumb companies fall in line and make ongoing blackmail payments to Microsoft ...

I can't believe someone would be so dumb as to believe that none of those companies had their own IP specialists and lawyers, and were actually paying valid licence fees for valid patents. The common one is the "long file names"* patent which IIRC has been examined quite closely - and I'm pretty sure that if there were any loopholes then some of the big boys would have quite happily squashed it.

* For the hard of remembering, under DOS (and it's FAT filesystem) files were originally limited to 8.3 characters (ie 8 characters for the name plus another 3 for the type). This was eventually considered "quite limiting", and longer file names were wanted. The problem is that it's easy to just do a new filesystem and add longer filenames, but that wouldn't be backward compatible with anything.

So MS came up with a clever mechanism that slotted longer filenames into the existing filesystem - so you could take your disk with "NICE KITTY PICTURE.JPG" and it would still be readable on older OSs (as something along the lines of NICE K~$.JPG").

The only way to do long filenames in a way that's compatible with DOS/Windows machines is to use the same encoding method MS came up with. Since that's patented, then that means if you produce anything that supports long file names on FAT disks then you are infringing on that patent unless you get a licence.

THAT is one of the patents which Android manufacturers are paying for, and legislation like this proposal will not change that.