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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.
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
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..
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."
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
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).
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.
...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!
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
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...
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.