Seagate May Sue if Solid State Disks Get Popular 242
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.'"
Who was first? (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
patents and copyrights (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Can you sue about a "No-duh" idea? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is our patent system now unconstitutional? (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Poor USAians... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Can you sue about a "No-duh" idea? (Score:2, Interesting)
Make love, not war (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over (Score:5, Interesting)
Is that how the IRAM-2 died? (Score:5, Interesting)
The next generation of IRAM [techpowerup.com] fixed my major pain point - allowing dirt cheap DDR2 RAM and allowing 8G max storage per drive.
Re:Is our patent system now unconstitutional? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not unconstitutional because patents are granted to the inventors. You'll never see a business name in the inventor field of a patent--as, compared to say, the rest of the world where entities are regularly listed as the inventor.
Instead, patents, and in some senses a patent application, are treated like any other piece of personal property. That means that the owner can sell all or some part of the rights in that patent. Companies end up with ownership of patents in much the same way as they own anything else they purchase.
Before I get a bunch of responses that say companies just take the invention from their employees, I'll respond to that as well. Companies acquire assignment to inventions of employees usually by way of employment agreements, but this makes sense (in general). Your employer is paying you to do work. Since they're paying you, and you're doing their work, it follows that you're being fully compensated for your work (which includes your inventive activities).
Re:Can you sue about a "No-duh" idea? (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever noticed how a lot of new cars look pretty much the same? Hard drive interfaces are a lot like that if you allow anyone to patent minor differences. Oh, but hard drive interface ABC uses blue connectors instead of grey. Minor differences and logical extensions of existing patented inventions are things that make for bs patents. SSD is an enhancement to existing technology, NOT some "OMG, how did they think of that" technology. Back in '92 people were talking about that.
Logical extension of existing things: email on wireless devices, methods to store data on a computer, using RAM to replace the mechanical magnetic materials in hard drives, and on and on
Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorry, that fails the logic test. Seems to me that spinning platters are on their way out. Welcome to the solid state world.
Re:Confusion (Score:5, Interesting)
Toshiba preps 128GB solid-state notebook drive (Score:4, Interesting)
So...
There's also an issue related to ROI.
Sad (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:holy cats! the world is changing! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you miss the best reason for SSD on laptops. That means with the exception of my fans, the laptop is all solid state. Which means I don't worry as much about moving it around while reading data, or gyroscopic forces. I worry about these things because I don't know excatly how they work, but I 'm sure shaking a spinning disk based drive is bad. And if I don't know, than I will arrogantly (but accurately) say that most people don't know. Hence, selling point.
Re:holy cats! the world is changing! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over (Score:5, Interesting)
I think its all hot air or at least is trying to gauge Intel's and Samsung's reaction because he's not threatening some small time business here. Intel probaly had a large team of persons compiling new patents on a daily basis and if push came to shove in court Intel would counter with their own set of patents along with Samsung's team and then Toshiba and IBM might jump in and the proverbial MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) ICBM's filled with patent experts will be landing lawsuits left and right at each others door until only the lawyers are left standing.
So no... Seagate would never want to actually go through with it because they have no idea what patents Intel might have that they could claim that Seagate is currently violating. My hunch is Seagate wants to calm investor fears in the current technology.
After all, even if Seagate won the war, Intel might just start making mother boards or CPU that have lines of code that say:
if $HDD_Manufacture = Seagate { do not boot & give error message "Faulty HDD! contact OEM" }
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who was first? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is incidentally in the works to be changed. The rest of the world uses "first to file" and it is claimed that the change would reduce the paperwork required to approve patents. (Like we need more patents, sheesh.)
Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly the kind of use I had in mind. The huge but very linear datasets where track jumping is minimal that tend to make up the vast bulk of personal storage these days and that will only increase.
OS, software, databases, etc, need low latency to be 'fast'. Bulk multimedia storage doesn't.
I'd go apeshit for a 5TB drive that's quiet, inexpensive and could transfer on the order or 30-40MB/sec.
A 5-10 TB drive would probably be doable today with existing surface density. I dont think you'd lose that much on the transfer rate tho; data rate depends on the surface velocity which remains almost as high due to the increased circumference.
And, yes, I had a bigfoot too. It's not something you want to put your OS on; then again, as noted, flash might be the best thing to put that on whatever you do to disk speed. Personally I have most my OS cached in actual RAM on my workstations in combination with the RAM on my iSCSI storage servers. But it's not that part that causes most issues; it's finding actual space for storing the ever increasing amount of mythtv recordings...
Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hell no! (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't be so sure with that. Harddrives are mechanically complicated devices, and that establishes a floor for harddrive prices, as it still costs a certain amount to create all the mechanical bits and put them together, no matter how small of capacity the drive is (you can ask Microsoft about this in regards to the XBox). Flash drives on the other hand, are very simple devices in comparison. Once you get a flash drive large enough to house the OS plus a bit of room left over for cheaper than the cheapest harddrive of any capacity (seems to be about $40-$50 or so), you'll see flash drives start to take over the low end. It'll probably happen fairly soon too, as you can get 16GB of flash for about $50 now if you shop around. Another couple of doublings of capacity for the same price and you'll be there.