OIN Seeks Prior Art in TomTom Patent Suit

Filed in archive News on May 2, 2009

© Elliot Moore

The Open Invention Network (OIN) this week announced an effort to find prior art for Microsoft's FAT patents as used in its lawsuit against TomTom.

"The OIN's new FAT-busting project is a response to a lawsuit that Microsoft settled earlier this year with navigation device maker TomTom," explains Ars Technica's Ryan Paul. "The lawsuit claimed that TomTom's Linux-based products infringe on a number of Microsoft's patents, including several that describe technical attributes of Microsoft's FAT filesystem. TomTom initially fought back by filing a countersuit of its own and by joining the OIN, but eventually agreed to pay a licensing fee and remove the features from its implementation."

"OIN this week posted details on the three patents — U.S. patents 5579517, 5758352 and 6256642 — to a section of its Linux Defenders website in an attempt to get community members searching for prior art that could prevent Microsoft from wielding them in future lawsuits," writes ChannelWeb's Kevin McLaughlin.

More here from iTWire ... more here from ZDNet ... more here from CNET ... more here from The Register ... and the press release is here.