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Seagate Sues STEC For Patent Infringement
Lucas123 writes "Yesterday Seagate filed suit against STEC, claiming several of its products, including solid state disks and some DRAM devices, infringe as many as four of its patents. Today STEC responded that it holds patents on the technology 10 years older than Seagate's. A Seagate win in the suit, or a settlement, could result in the equivalent of a tax on SSDs and potentially other flash memory products, increasing prices to end users at a time when demand for SSD storage is exploding."
The Empire is going to be pissed.
In business timing is everything.
STEC makes some of the best (in terms of reqrite/erase endurance) Flash RAM modules for the money. As a new Eee PC user, I am about to buy one or two of their SD cards, as their models are actually unmatched WRT write endurance, by any SD manufacturer, as far as I could tell. Very few focus on this characteristic - all the others mostly only care about transfer speed and capacity. Why does the juggernaut Seagate have to go after this particular manufacturer?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Wasn't it just a month or so ago when the CEO of Seagate said he wasn't worried about SSD impacting their market, but if it became a threat, they would use their patent portfolio to defend against the new competition? So doesn't this mark a very rapid change of outlook on Seagate's part? I guess SSDs are the next big thing--Seagate confirms it.
At last. A patent lawsuit that I can find some humour in. Usually they are frustrating and sad. I would like to mod the whole article +1 funny. On a side note, all of my drives are Seagate. I have had good luck with them and dig their 5 year warranties. I have had an 80 gig seagate that until very recently I have been using as my OS drive without the slightest sign of problems since 80 gig drives were state of the art (is SOA or SOTA a valid acronym?).
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I used to have a 20MB Sandisk IDE Flash drive from 1996. It had a standard laptop IDE connector on it. I'm not sure what its purpose was as I got it bare with nothing attached to it. But that shows the technology of IDE Flash drives have been around for at least 12 years.
Once again, patents protect the innovative small company from brutal and unwarranted aggression by larger out-dated firms who...
Hang on. Seagate. Right.
Oh, this must be one of those very rare cases where patents don't act in the interests of society.
My blog
You can read it here.
STEC believes that Seagate's action is a desperate move to disrupt how aggressively customers are embracing STEC's Zeus-IOPS technology and changing the balance of power in enterprise storage.
QFT
STEC, next in a long list of innovative startups to spend their R&D of legal maneuvering with Seagate.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
Slavegate would make an excellent tag for all stories involving Seagate. Thanks for the idea.
This is a perfect example of where the patent system is broken. It makes only logical common sense that the innovator here should be allowed to continue unfettered after paying a minimum penalty payment. By minimum, I mean $1 USD or something, and the patent holder forced to negotiate royalties via arbitration. If you have the patent and sit on it... tough, sucks to be you. If you wait more than 1 year after the common market sale of said product, you get nothing and the patent falls to public domain.
If you are found to be stifling innovation by using patents to block innovators... well, say good bye to ALL your patents in the next 7 years. At least any patents that look similar to the one in question. Say, all your hard drive patents.
Patents are meant to protect, not be used to bludgeon your competition into bankruptcy. If you misuse them... nach!, all your patents are belong to the public domain.
It's time that this stupid use of patents was brought to an end.
Sure, my suggestion has some issues, but every solution less than 100 pages long does. The idea is what I'm offering, not the fine details.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Maybe STEC can get Kurt Denke on the phone about this. He seems to have pwned Monster Cables with patent C&D latters.
The problem is not unique to the patent system. What is needed is stricter laws that heavily penalize abuse of the court system. It shouldn't matter if it is the RIAA consistently dropping their cases after discovery, SCO claiming copyright infringement without a case, some silly patent about connecting voip to a phone line, or any other number of equally retarded claims. If it can be shown with a reasonable level of evidence that your lawsuit has clandestine motives and that you are effectively abusing the court system in order to make life difficult for somebody else, then you and your lawyer should be heavily penalized.
Simply put the courts isn't some sea-side casino where you go fishing when you can't come up with anything better to do, and if you treat it as such you deserve a decent slap so you don't do it again.
If this is just a SATA connection, how does Seagate own it to start with? Other companies make SATA hard drives. And if they don't own it, how are you in trouble adhering to it?
I see that Intel is potentially dragged into this as well. Wouldn't it be great if Intel announced that their next chipset wouldn't connect to Seagate drives unless Seagate cross-licensed some new protocol item. And once they did, Intel extends that licensing to other drive manufacturers. After all, this nonsense can't be good for Intel's business.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
He just didn't know which possible patents he could throw against it at the time and didn't want to be questioned on that point. Now he believes he knows that answer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
May Apple II had an SSD disk. Sun workstations had them. They have been used with and without battery backup, as a write cache for disks, to speed up NFS, whatever. Since the disk controller and disk driver imposes such overhead, it matters little what you do on the card, other than a little write leveling and parallel I/O for slow flash. Whatever you do with them is trivial engineering.
What's next? Patents on blinkenlights? Patents on the power switch?
Can't compete? Litigate!
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
So called "fiduciary duty" is interpreted as a duty to do all abusive and illegal things to bring "shareholders value". On the other hand, corporations are not liable for their actions. There are two rules of law to be effective:
1) penalty for abuse couts/patent system/ets (as described above)
2) personal liability for corporate abuses: a CEO is liable for corporation's actions, alternatively he can forward his liability to shareholder (if there is a proof that shareholder was pressing a corporation to behave unlawful to get more profit); high risk, big money; big money, high risk; (this is my sense of justice - forcing corps to behave morally and not letting CEOs for risking nothing and landing with their gold parachutes);
I had been wondering over the last couple years what Seagate's response was going to be to the rise of cheap flash memory. Apparently the answer is "become a drain on society and try to slow things down as much as possible since we can't keep up".
It seems in the modern "free market" when you get big bloated and stupid rather than go out of business or adapt it is a legitimate course of action to instead become a parasite and suck money out of the economy by abusing the legal system.
This is unfortunate, I didn't have anything against Seagate until recently.
They behave like their product is superior in some way, maybe it once was, but they are slipping big time. I have several backup drives some have been going 1-2 years, I foolishly bought a Segate FreeAgent Pro it overheated and burned out in less than 4 months the esata never worked, a known issue, and the overheating issue is known as well! Yes it's under warranty but I lose my data and have to mail it in, so that they can send me another bum drive! Iomega in similar circumstances just sent out a new drive, I say drop Seagate like a hot potato!
...when EMC/IBM/HDS/HP are charging you $2000 for a 250GB drive.
"But it's the special firmware we put on the drive....."
Bullshit, you put it in a fancy carrier and put a couple of LEDs on the outside.
I can't wait to see the pricing on SSDs for DMX arrays.
the patent system isn't broken, it's doing exactly what it's designed to do... just not what the public was told it was to do. it just one more form of control to keep the elite, elite.