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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.'"

2 of 242 comments (clear)

  1. patents and copyrights by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

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    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  2. Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over by qoncept · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think you'll see SSD gain huge market share in the next 3 years. Magnetic disks will still prevail where there are huge storage needs through at least the next 5 years, but flash based storage will be cheaper and faster for storage capacities that you need to run your computer normally. I picture Dell selling computers with a 128gb flash based drive, and a 1tb magnetic drive. Laptops will be SSD exclusively.

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    Whale