Seagate Sues STEC For Patent Infringement 51
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."
Aw crap! (Score:5, Interesting)
Seagate scared (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Aw crap! (Score:3, Interesting)
The USPTO is broken. full. stop. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Seagate scared DELAY EXPLAINED (Score:3, Interesting)
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... (Score:3, Interesting)