Blackmoor Vituperative

The U.S. Patent Office has rejected two Microsoft patents over the FAT file format, but the software maker said Wednesday that it’s not ready to give up its battle to protect its widely used method for storing data.

The patent office delivered its ruling late last month but made it public this week. With one of the patents, the decision is what’s considered a final rejection, while with another it’s considered nonfinal. In both cases, Microsoft has the ability to pursue its claims further.

The rejections come after a re-examination of the patents was sought by the Public Patent Foundation, which argued that they were invalid because there was “prior art,” that is, evidence that others had done similar work before Microsoft’s patent application. A U.S. Patent Office examiner issued a preliminary rejection of one Microsoft patent in September 2004.

(from ZDNet, Microsoft’s Linux-related patents rejected)

Don’t celebrate yet: money is the engine of our legal sytem, and Microsoft has a lot of it. It’s only a matter of time until they buy what they need to shut Linux down within the USA. To be clear, I do not begrudge Microsoft their millions: I believe that they earned most of it. What vexes me is that our legal system and our legislators are open to the highest bidder.

It will get worse before it gets better.