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Seagate May Sue if Solid State Disks Get Popular
tero writes "Even though Seagate has announced it will be offering SSD disks of its own in 2008, their CEO Bill Watkins seems to be sending out mixed signals in a recent Fortune interview 'He's convinced, he confides, that SSD makers like Samsung and Intel (INTC) are violating Seagate's patents. (An Intel spokeswoman says the company doesn't comment on speculation.) Seagate and Western Digital (WDC), two of the major hard drive makers, have patents that deal with many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer, Watkins says. It stands to reason that sooner or later, Seagate will sue — particularly if it looks like SSDs could become a real threat.'"
we better sue to stop it, FAST!
-- haaz.
Occasionally I get to thinking that, with 6 billion people coming up with ideas, just because you're the first to send them to the U.S. Patent Office doesn't necessarily mean you're guaranteed the money for those ideas. While people are supposed to do research (including patent research) when inventing, it seems a pain to scour every patent for similarities or places where the patents are so broad, your new invention MIGHT fit into it.
Is it not possible that someone at Samsung came up with the idea before Seagate, but just didn't patent it? Or we could go by the saying: "Ideas are cheap." Just because you dreamed up an invention, why should you get some of the money for all the work put into implementation, marketing, manufacturing, etc?
To answer my own question, I suppose it's because otherwise, no one would report their ideas without a working model and/or contract with a production company in place. They'd never be able to make any money off it as it would be used by someone else if made known. I won't go on about how I feel about the mighty dollar/euro/rupee and how it stifles innovation...
Yeah, personally I'd like to see some actual specific patents rather than a CEO full of hot air making baseless threats. I'm sure Seagate has patents on storage device communication, but this article offers no insight on how SSD makers could be infringing. This is like the crazy patent claims Microsoft made against Linux (what was that? 184 alleged patents? More?) Examples would be nice.
Anyhow, flash prices may be dropping, but I don't see SSDs gaining majority marketshare within the next 5 years. Developers get lazy, cameras get more mega pixels, more people need digital video. Spinning disks are still massively cheaper per GB than SSDs, and unless the price were to drop dramatically, hard disks will still have the edge to keep the throne. Laptops may see SSDs sooner due to power, but I'd imagine that one way to forestall the inevitable victory of SSD would be more intelligent caching and a larger onboard cache for hard drives.
Anyhow, Seagate is worrying about market dominance, and the Seagate CEO makes vague threats that the lawyers at Intel and Samsung probably laughed off. Not that newsworthy in my opinion. Specific patents or litigation would be very notable though.
were originally intended to foster progress, cultural riches, innovation
and now they are used as perverse tools to squash progress, stifle innovation, and make us culturally impoverished
not that any of this means there will be a social revolution, but i see the real possibility of a legal revolution. that is, the public simply ignoring the bullshit intellectual property lawyers invent in order to justify their existence
dear intellectual property lawyers: you suck. your entire field is becoming a farce. you write and interpret and enforce law that does not serve society, it only serves your field. i propose a mutiny and jettison of the whole lot of you useless parasites
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can you sue about something so basic? I mean what about the guy that programed the Ramdisk.com DOS program that would let you use RAM as a drive? Why wouldn't that qualify as well?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
When companies cannot innovate, they litigate. They work hard to slow down the market so that they can catch up.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Seagate sold me 4 of their stupid Maxtorgates (drives from the former maxtor factory) that failed immediately - and most of the replacements ALSO failed immediately.
The won't give me the address to send them the legal notice so I can sue their sorry asses off.
Their Indian tech support said "we can't do that!"
Get me the address - I want to sue on behalf of everyone who bought brand-new drives and had to pay the shipping to get replacements.
Quote article one:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
Since we're now getting companies suing to prevent advances in the useful arts using powers granted through patent legislation, can we now find that contemporary patent law is a violation of both the letter and spirit of the Constitution?
And, yes, I'm aware that there's a lot of other stuff going on our federal govt. that's probably a violation of the letter and spirit of the constitution.
This sounds like a typical software-related patent issue, as they are talking about the communication between the storage device and the computer. So if they sue, and are successful, then the whole world will be using SSD drives, except for poor old USA, stuck with the mechanical devices.
Now I am pro-patents, but software does not belong in the patent world. This could be the ultimate example of how patents stop innovation and technical progress.
By the way, I wonder how a SSD hard disk is really different from a standard memory card.
Arthur Clarke, in his last interview with IEEE Spectrum - "I'm often asked why I didn't try to patent the idea of communications satellites. My answer is always, 'A patent is really a license to be sued.' "
It would probably be more profitable, and better for PR, if Seagate held private meetings with the other manufacturers to discuss patents and licensing terms. Explaining the issue and offering reasonable terms would bring them serious cash. Weak threats in a public forum seems a lot less productive, unless of course they don't actually have any patents to stand on.
Developers: We can use your help.
You will probably never see a major corporation admit that patents are largely become just a form of rent-seeking than this.
Well, if they believe people are infringing on their patents now they need to sue now, otherwise later when they decide it's worth suing for, they might get reminded that if they didn't defend their position early on, it's all over.
... if I treat the storage as a black box, and I stick an interface in front of it which allows me to access it as the same kind of black box, where have I infringed? If I could make accessible storage before, and I still make accessible storage, WTF has actually changed?
But, seriously
As usual with some of this patent stuff, this just sounds like crap -- it seems to amount to an indication that if their share of the pie gets eroded too much they're going to have a tantrum. You can't just say "in two years we'll start suing all of these people for violating the patents we claim to have right now".
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Just another example of our patent system encouraging innovation...
I wonder, if Seagate successfully sued for patent infringements, how much would they actually get? I mean, if the judgment were for $30 million, they may only see $29,296,875 of it.
Years back, Gigabyte released a RAM based SATA drive - the iRAM. This is why folks were excited about it - just honking fast. It had limitations, however. 4x1G max capacity per drive, used (relatively spendy)DDR1 RAM, and apparently did not work nicely in a RAID-0 config when trying to bump the storage capacity. Still, RAM rather than flash is what I was looking for as a primary OS drive.
... but it never released... (if anyone here knows of such a device, please post or email) Other drives are on the market, but they want 4 figure price tags. I don't get it. For those of us who can deal with having a hard drive that could 'evaporate' if it ran out of juice for one reason or another (disk images)...trading performance for the hassle... why did the DDR2 drives never make it out? Seagate wielding the patent stick would explain much.
The next generation of IRAM fixed my major pain point - allowing dirt cheap DDR2 RAM and allowing 8G max storage per drive.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
SSDD
We are gonna wait till it's popular, then sue. ----WTF is that, it's greed. Much like Gibson suing everyone and their mom's now that Guitar Hero is a big thing, if you have a right to something, bring it up as soon as it happens, not when you think you can maximize cash. Why is that practice even legal?
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
Those are 2 companies that have VAST patent portfolios, I'm sure. Especially Intel.
I imagine that Seagate is violating some Intel and/or Samsung patents, in one obscure and stupid way or another. Seriously, Seagate doesn't have the juice to take on those 2 companies. Never mind that if Seagate really decides to start some shit with their hard-drive patents, I imagine that IBM will get involved, since they own most of the patents on the basic technology of hard drives. And we all know how IBM deals with people that sue them- they take no prisoners.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
There... I fixed the subject line for you. Obviously you didn't read enough earlier Slashdot articles this morning.
Where is Intel in all this? They make the south bridge and MCH chips that talk to SATA drives. Are only Seagate and WD drives allowed to connect to them? Is Intel beholden to patent holders on the SATA interface? Why not connect future drives through USB 2/3 if SATA is patent encumbered?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
- There are in fact no relevant patents
- There are but the devices do not infringe
- There are, Samsung changes the design, might have to pay back royalties but the effects will be limited as Seagate don't have SSD products in the marketplace
- There are, design can't be changed, they do a deal
- There are, design can't be changed, Samsung IP lawyers dig up some stuff Seagate is violating somewhere, they do a deal
- South Korean company buys Seagate
For Seagate, the issue is to a certain extent that they can't piss off their customers too much. Apple for instance use lots of HDDs but they also want to use SSDs and Seagate doesn't yet have a product - and when they do, where will they get the flash memory from? Oops...just pissed off both customers and suppliers.Mind you, I do like the Momentus drives.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
... but I am already boycotting them for selling products that fail to communicate properly with the computer. Well, it's more like buying something else (WDC) that works better (especially in Linux). It's too bad that this abuse of the patent system leads to high costs of improving on the mistakes, screw ups, and often incompetency of others.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Toshiba preps 128GB solid-state notebook drive -- "While manufacturers plow ahead with notebook-targeted SSDs, questions are arising as to whether they deliver a performance boost significant enough to justify the higher cost."
So...
There's also an issue related to ROI.
How to Download YouTube Videos
What I'd love to see is Seagate trying to examine their competitor's products in order to prove that they're really infringing. Their competitors invoke the DMCA, hilarity ensues.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
DEC sold a line of solid state disks somewhere around 20 years ago, for which they probably had
patents but by now these will be expired. (They used the rejects from memory fabs, which they
called "the skim milk of the crop", and worked around all the bad bits to get usable memory that
was cheap enough to use.) Certainly one can use similar techniques to theirs (likely today with
better memory) and make solid state disks. No way Seagate or anyone else could patent that (once the
old technology was pointed out).
Being Slashdot I know a lot of people are just frothing at the mouth at the mere mention of the word "patent" but settle down. For starters, Seagate's CEO says he is "convinced" that their patents are being infringed -- offering no evidence at this point. So for now it's just bullshit posturing that may or may not materialize into anything. He could just be hedging his bets and making it look like Seagate has plans to protect their business to placate investors. With SSDs being an emerging technology no one really knows what's going to happen anyway. And what if it turns out that they do have a legitimate claim on patent infringement?
This is just sad. It just screams one thing at me:
If we fail to keep our heads above the water by making good products, we'll sue.
And this time, it's not just some slashdotter seeing ghosts where there may not be any: this is straight from the horse's mouth.
If they think their competitors should not be using certain technologies, they should negotiate with them to come to acceptable agreements. If that fails, they can sue. Threatening to sue if their competitors' products become successful is...evil.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If you (should reasonably) know that an infringing item is on the market, you must defend you patent immediately or lose rights to it. If Seagate suspects that the SSDs are infringing, they should be required to move now and not be allowed wait until the competitive item is successful.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I have, in the archives right here on Slashdot, an article where I describe this kind of technology in 2002. Now, I don't know what the patents in question are, but if they postdate 2002, there's prior art right here on Slashdot.
...actively practiced for 50+ years or longer. And it pissed people off back then as much as it does today. All that has changed is the length of time you can sit on your patent before wielding it, to avoid its effective nullification by Doctrine of Latches.
And BTW, Gibson's patent from 1999 does actually seem to cover the Guitar Hero game's "system and method of a simulated musical performance". Blame the USPTO and the current patent laws, not Gibson here, because Gibson is following the patent law pretty much exactly as the current patent law stands, to protect that technology to which they have a currently valid legal stake in.
The enemy of my enemy ... is my friend.
If Seagate pushes hard enough, they may find this out the hard way. They may be an 800lb gorilla in the storage market. But, even a large ape does not like getting stung by a thousand bees, and Seagate is waving a stick around a number of bee hives, in my view of things.
What if, faced with a potential lawsuit from Seagate, we were to see Intel, Samsung, TI, etc., get together and develop a new standard that bypasses Seagate's IP. They could license it to each other for next to nothing... except to Seagate... no soup for you. Sure, they'd like to be safe from a backlash in the spinning media world. But, given the rapid price drops on SSD storage, at some point the SSD media will be "cheap enough" for primary storage and spinning media would be relegated to 2nd tier, archival storage. Intel certainly has the smarts and the fabrication facilities to develop a competitor to anything Seagate might come up with.
Here's an honest question I've been wondering about for a while. Why don't we use GigE or 10GigE to communicate with storage? I imagine there's more overhead than with the currently used protocols, but how much are we talking about here? I'm more of a software than hardware guy, though I know a little about the different layers in the ISO model. *waves hands*. Build in a router on the motherboard, have a port for talking to the outside world and a few ports for talking to storage. Economy of scale and the hardware would be dirt cheap... right? Since it seems like an obvious idea, I'm sure I'm missing something. Would someone who knows these things care to elaborate? Tnx!
Posting anonymously for reasons that will be obvious shortly.
I worked for Seagate, and back in 2002 I tried in vain to get someone to listen to me regarding SSD. I knew even back then that our old platter/spinning disks/power eating motors/magnetic crap was doomed. I even spoke to people in R&D and told them Seagate should seriously investigate the possibility.. of course their answer was "it's too expensive, no one will ever buy those"..
Yup, again those amazing Phd's and MBA's were right.. oh wait..
Unless those Maxtor drives were doing the click of death... I suggest you get a multimeter to your power supply for over/under voltage.
Thermal issues may come into play here.
If the firmware/serial numbers were near the same than it was probably a batch/fab issue.
(Former HD recover tech that had to deal with pallets of failed Maxtor drives.)
I was under the impression that with intellectual property, if you were aware of a violation you HAD to pursue its resolution immediately, or else risk foregoing legal protections. The point of which is to prevent just what's being suggested here--waiting for a technology to become widespread specifically in order to profit more from the eventual suit. Am I missing something here? Any IP lawyers want to chime in on how this could be legit?
Back in the day, if a hard drive failed under warranty, you sent it back (at your expense) waited a week, and then you got a replacement drive in return.
OR
If you needed a drive really fast, the manufacturer would advance ship you a drive (2-3 days instead of a week) if you gave them a credit card number so they could place a hold on the card for the amount of the drive. Then you returned the drive to them in their packaging (again at your expense).
Recently I was surprised to find out that Seagate no longer does advanced exchanges for free - they charge $20 for an advanced exchange. If that doesn't smell like greed, I don't know what does.
YOUR drive failed under YOUR warranty, and now I need to pay for the privilege of an advanced exchange. F.U. Seagate. You used to care about your customers, not any more.
This threat of suing if solid state disks become popular just confirms my belief that Seagate has lost their way. They no longer care about producing the best technology and making their customers happy. Now it's about profit at the expense of everyone else.
Hey Seagate, you may not have heard but there are a few companies in the hard drive business besides you. Those companies will get my (and my company's business) from now on.
-ted
Why is this moderated Interesting? It sounds like a complete troll. Software-related patent issue? Maybe. The article is quite vague as to what patents Seagate thinks is being infringed upon (ignoring the fact that the CEO never specifically states that they will sue if SSDs get popular, the article "reasons" that out.) The statement about "communication between the storage device and the computer" is also made by the article, in relation to what patents Seagate (and WDC) have, never specifying whether this a patent on the hardware or software of the communication. We'd need to see what the patents actually are before we can draw a conclusion as to wether this is a patent on software or hardware (interfaces, maybe?)
Regardless of the patent issue, claiming the "poor old USA" would be "stuck" with mechanical Hard drives while the rest of the world is using SSD drices is just plain patronizing. Nevermind that both mechanical Hard Drives and SSDs have their own specific advantages that will ensure that neither fully dominates "the whole world." Never mind the ludicrous claim that one company's *posssible* attempts to litigate would some how relegate the US to some storage medium dark age (real or imagined.) Never mind the only concievably interesting statement would be the last line about memory cards (side note: assuming you mean flash-based memory cards, then the only difference I suppose would be the technology employed in getting the higher storage capacity.) Nevermind all that,the post above is just a dripping with a trollish, condescending tone towards the US. Criticizing the US is fine, but please do so in a reasonable, less-condescending tone. Suggestions for a better system would be highly recommended.
Demented But Determined.
If this is really an issue why not sue now. I really don't understand how they can be allowed to hold off on enforcing their patents until something starts to do well. Either they enforce their "rights" or they don't.
Both WD and Seagate are probably soiling themselves looking to the near future were SSDs will replace rotating hard drives in 80-90% of shipped PCs, think typical BestBuy or Dell computer not what Slashdotters buy. Flash/SSD lowers the cost of entry into the hard drive business, just look at all the companies making SSDs or announcing SSD. Somebody will make a chip that does SATA to Flash and then everybody and their dog will be turning out SSDs just like thumb drives. Then throw in that at least Intel and Samsung are both huge players in the flash market are you can start to see the problem. In 5 years WD and Seagate may be relegated to shipping niche "Bulk storage" drives and the the common boot drive will be sourced like video cards are now.
At last fall's Intel Developer Conference (IDF), Pat Gelsinger held up a prototype SSD and announced that Intel would soon enter the driver market. Intel has the silicon manufacturing capability and the platform involvement to really be a major supplier.
I have an idea that might revolutionize TV advertising. I have no money to invest, and I really have no interest in trying to bring the idea to market. How can I document this idea so that others cannot patent it? Is there a GPL for ideas/patents?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
that is retarded,if segate sues b/c ssd gets popular then all they will accompolish is keeping technoligy in the public realm from moving forward. ssd is the next natural evolution of storage on a computer be it laptop or desktop, ssd is the natural way to go. more compact, less power useage, faster acess to data= faster computer. segate and western digital may own the pattents but if they sue and issue a cease and desist order, they will only spark a large ammount of end user anger against them. all they really need is royaltys from each drive sold, or just step up the production of their own ssd drives. even if they dont get royaltys from anything as far as ssd goes they will not loose any market share and they will not loose any money, they will be still making just as much if not more than what they are making now.
Why do people keep calling these solid state flash memory devices DISKS?? Just because these devices are going to eventually replace our spinning "hard disk drives" doesn't mean we should continue to call them disks. So, SSD means "solid state disk", not "solid state drive"? That makes no sense...there's no disk inside them.
Paul
I doubt that the patent would hold up against a team of lawyers and techies in a room, we've had ATA and SCSI SSDs for years in the server market at varied capacities, it's only recently that it's become economically viable for the average user to get them with the advances in density when it comes to flash tech - but they've been around for a minute.
www.isoHunt.com
Even if they do manage to prove some form of infringement, they won't get much out of it. Claiming that the infringement is causing immediate and irreparable harm doesn't accomplish much when they knew about the infringement previously and took no action. If it wasn't important to them then, it's still not that important.
What's really happening here is that Seagate is facing declining sales and can see that SSD technology will further erode their market. Rather than sit down at the drawing board and create new competitive products, they're choosing to use one or more patents that they own as weapons against current or future competitors. This is the very definition of anti-competitive behavior.
Ultimately Seagate will have to adapt or die. If they choose to pursue this through the courts it's quite likely that the industry will simply use a different interface to access their drives. A solid state drive can be connected to the system bus in many, many different ways and all modern operating systems would only need a new driver to access the data. In this scenario, Seagate doesn't get the bags of cash it's dreaming of from patent royalties and ends up in a much worse position than they're in now. They'd lose sales even faster because they spent their money litigating instead of innovating and their public image would go into the toilet.
Another possible scenario is for Seagate to design and build their own line of SSDs and compete on their merits. This would give them the best chance of surviving into the future - but those patents still aren't any help. They could give free or very low cost licenses to use the patented technology to all players - or they would be forced to use the new interface that everyone else is using. They couldn't sit back and use their own patented interface because it wouldn't be compatible with the industry standard.
Or they could simply do nothing and watch their company slowly wither away. Considering the rapid development pace of SSDs (capacities increasing, prices decreasing) it's just a matter of time until hard drives take their place in history just like floppy drives have already done.
Sandisk (and I believe the pre-spin-off Sundisk) was making flash 3.5" IDE drives in the early 90's. The IDE interface is so crude and obvious that there is no way a patent on it can be enforced. Once you get past the physical interface the data handling in a SSD is completely different from a mechanical drive. Unless Seagate has active patents on SATA that they are sitting on I can't imagine they will be able to do anything about the rise of SSDs.
Obviously this is a preemptive posturing by a potential buggywhip manufacturer. Frankly I don't know what they are scared of. The data density and profit margin are still much better for mechanical drives. They stand to lose out on the consumer market with the shift to portable computers where SSDs really shine on power consumption and capacity can be sacrificed. However, there will always be a need for mass storage in data centers.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Surely seagate owns a patent they're breaking right now on samsungs existing hard disk line.
I think you will find that enterprise world is already full of different Storage-over-the-net standards. Not on consumer level yet apart from a few nasty iSCSI NAS boxes, but trickling down slowly.
Yes, it is an obvious idea. Just that caring about expanding your multi-tb arrays without opening up or physically handling each of 20 your production servers is not a consumer case yet. Slapping a case open, fitting, slapping a case shut makes more sense in desktop enviroment currently.
It could go either way,on a case by case basis and determined by the judge, just like that dancing MS baboon haranguing open source Linux about their precious patents, every day they wait and not produce the actual patents and sue or send out notices, etc, means they might encounter the doctrine of laches.
I am dying for an SSD. It is silent, and rigid, and uses less power. And newer drives are guaranteed to be up to 4 times faster than the current "standard" SSD drives that Dell and Apple put in their laptops (200Mb/s versus 50Mb/s read). If you had the money, you would have no reason NOT to move to SSD, especially if you have a laptop, and more so if you use your computer for work. cameras get more mega pixels, more people need digital video On the contrary, reading huge files is where SSDs are fastest. Not everyone puts all their video on their pc, and if you do a terabyte drive might be what you need. However, if you wish to edit and process video and burn it onto DVDs then an SSD is exactly what you need to speed up crunch time multi-fold. An SSD for active files and an HDD for mass storage is the way it will be.
I agree that the low-end computer market will consist of HDDs for a long time to come. HDDs will not go away as long as they provide cost effectiveness. However, once the next generation drives are out and hit the 5USD/GB mark everyone with a buck will want one especially when their IT friends will be all over them.
SSDs are really old hat... the earliest ones that I remember were made by DEC for the PDP-11 and VAX. They had at least one that sat on the Unibus. I believe it was 2MB in capacity and intented mostly as a swap device. That would be the late 1970's.
They also made some for VAXes, such as the ESE20 and ESE50 (120MB):
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-7294324.html
late 1980's...
Well?
...)
I'm not buying anything with an iNTEL cpu, myself.
(Not buying anything at all until I get a real job, but,
I remember reading once that a good measure of a society would be to compare the density of the artists, entrepreneurs, and engineers (the creatives) with the lawyers (people who redistribute) and accountants (people who count and quantify).
Patent law and the number of people sued for things that look stupid right on the surface convince that the quote has some relevance.
Surely before one builds one's $50m fab, one checks the patents relevant to one's intended market?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Would they still be circular? My thumb drive is decidedly rectangular.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..