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.

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.

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.

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.