
Linus Torvalds: Long Filenames (1992) - shawndumas
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.minix/0rgZpprg_Eo/NBSyZkYKRYsJ
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salient
If Microsoft has been collecting billions in revenue with an invalid patent
for years, could the court (or EU Commission?) force them to reimburse that
money?

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drakaal
No. Basically if you fought and lost a patent dispute your dispute was still
held. If you licensed a patent you licensed it, and it was believed to be
valid.

If you dispute the patent, fight, escrow the license fees, or filed with the
court, and the court ordered you to continue paying during the dispute, then
you could get your money back.

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bo1024
Is this "prior art", or evidence that the idea is "obvious" or "trivial"?

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Natsu
Well, it would be evidence that the idea was trivial, but they just assume
that everyone magically knows about the patents we're generally forbidden to
read and they won't hold against a patent the fact that it's trivial in
hindsight because that's to vague... so they let through a lot of silly
patents instead.

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finnh
What do you mean "patents we're generally forbidden to read"?

Patents are public domain.

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CurtHagenlocher
You don't work for a large company that does software development, do you?

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duked
I do and what's said above is not the case in my company. When we submit a
patent we actually have to do our own search for prior art (either published
scientific papers, or patents) before some patent lawyer does its own patent
search.

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nextweek2
That is a very dangerous way to act. If you glanced at another patent. Then 6
months later create a similar sounding patent. File that and the original
patent holder can claim you stole their idea. Weblogs would should you looking
at it and a lawyer would have no problem saying the idea was stolen.

You have no recourse to prove you did not copy the idea under the current
system. The general rule for software developers/patents creators is NOT to
look at someone else's work. Let a third party researcher do it and let them
decide. As an inventor you have to have a clean room design.

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mmagin
When I first heard about this patent, the first thing I thought of was UMSDOS
-- but this seems to be something else with the Minix filesystem.

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chinpokomon
I believe this "discovery" of prior art has already been shown in court a few
years ago when the FAT patents were challenged. it has between some time, but
this whole thread is very familiar.

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samspenc
I wonder why this patent has taken so long to invalidate.

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shawndumas
Microsoft stands to lose a lot of revenue because of the near indelibility of
the internet.

[edited]

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sp332
The internet is very "delable". Usenet wasn't archived _en masse_ until
DejaNews. Even then it wasn't a complete archive. They also allowed posts to
be deleted. DN sold the archive to Google in 2001, who ironically implemented
a terrible search feature. Google also allowed deleting posts until 2009.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News)

There is a _lot_ of the internet that is missing.

