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."

Comments

Aw crap!

[blind biker]

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?

Re:Aw crap!

[mpapet]

It's a shakedown.

Seagate fears the market potential STEC has. The simplest path is to litigate STEC to death over patents or trademark.

It's happened to every small company I've worked for. Most of them closed up shop because the big fish buried them in Trademark and Patent litigation over and over again.

Re:Aw crap!

[JrOldPhart]

Seagate is the Monster Cable of the Disk Drive Industry. Try to do a startup of any form of mass storage and you will need to spend a large portion of your seed money on legal to hold Seagate at bay. Until they see that you are standing dead.

Seagate scared

[crow]

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.

Re:Seagate scared

[keithjr]

You're absolutely correct. Here's the story you're referring to.

Resorting to patent lawsuits is NOT a sign of a confident/competent tech company. There's a good chance this will cause a backlash if it fails, which in my opinion is what Seagate richly deserves. Litigation must not become a viable business strategy.

Clearly, protecting the innovator

[pieterh]

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.

Re:Clearly, protecting the innovator

[geekoid]

Don't be stupid.
Patent are there to help the patent holder, regardless of size. They make it easier for the little guy to get into or start a market.

If Seagate has a patent, then they should gt compensation.

This is the patent system working fine.

Yes, it needs changes, but it also does what it is supposed to pretty well.

This is why 'patent reform' make me nervous. What are the odds that if it is reformed it will be better? very low, in fact I think if momentum begins going in that directions, large corporation will push to make it like copyright law.

Very specific areas need to change, or be removed.

STEC's Official Response

[relikx]

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

The USPTO is broken. full. stop.

[zappepcs]

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.

Re:The USPTO is broken. full. stop.

[stoev]

There is nothing, nothing, nothing innovative in SSD. The innovation may exist in Flash memory manufacturers and even this is very much in doubt. The situation currently is that huge companies like Samsung, Intel, Toshiba,... make enormous investments for new flash factories. They will be the beneficiaries of SSD, not some small innovative company. Seagate may be a monster in HDD business, but it is nothing compared to Samsung in more general terms.
So I wish Seagate good luck in defending their business. Because the next company they will have to target will be Samsung and this will not be a walk in the park.

Re:The USPTO is broken. full. stop.

[zappepcs]

If you walk into the courtroom with a working demo of the product you are developing for the patent, ok, you win. If you have nothing to show for your patent other than paperwork from the patent office... sorry.

Yes, if you do not act fast, you can lose the patent to the public domain. Of course, if you truly have something that is innovative and non-obvious it will not readily be 'also invented' by someone else.

The patent system was created to deal with commerce and innovation of 500+ years ago. Do I need tell you about the contrast between then and now?

Technology based patents are useless in about 5 years; nearly worthless in 3. Anything longer than 7 years is gratuitous. Yes, I believe that there should be levels of patents issued. If your technology is truly innovative and paradigm shifting, ok, 21 years. It's not so if all you did was change the color (colour) or connector.

There no longer is a one size fits all schema. If you want a business process patent, I'm okay with that, but you only get 2 years from date of issue, after that it goes to public domain.

Oh, genetic patents... nach! not getting them. If you think your soybean seeds are better than nature has created, prove it by selling more without a patent. Absolutely no patents on anything that nature created: all you are doing is changing the color or connector. period. no. joking.

And to answer your point, if you are working on something and can show valid reason to have the patent longer, so it will be. If you have nothing, that is EXACTLY what you are leaving the courtroom with.

Patent Infrignment

[Ceiynt]

Maybe STEC can get Kurt Denke on the phone about this. He seems to have pwned Monster Cables with patent C&D latters.

Re:Seagate scared DELAY EXPLAINED

[Nom du Keyboard]

So doesn't this mark a very rapid change of outlook on Seagate's part?

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.

And So It Goes...

[His Shadow]

Can't compete? Litigate!