Seagate May Sue if Solid State Disks Get Popular

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.'"

holy cats! the world is changing!

we better sue to stop it, FAST!

Re:holy cats! the world is changing!

To be fair, it seems like their plan is to sue to get a piece of it, via technology that they really did create. It wouldn't be very profitable just to stop progress.

Re:holy cats! the world is changing!

What are the odds that their patent simply contains the phrase: "A mechanism for storing or recreating data created on a computer for later retrieval."

(Slowly I put the freshly printed page down...)

Re:holy cats! the world is changing!

One of my complaints about patents as they currently are.
Either they are violating your patents (sue), or they're not (don't sue).
You dont get to sit there and wait and wait until they make gobs of money in case 1.
So seagate, are they violating your patent? If so, proof please, if not, you yield all rights in case they are found to at a later date

Confusion

So seagate, are they violating your patent? If so, proof please, if not, you yield all rights in case they are found to at a later date

I think you may be confusing patents with trademarks. Trademarks must be actively defended, where I believe patents on the other hand can be sat on for awhile.

Re:Confusion

He has a point though, patents aren't encouraging innovation, they're the club companies use to beat each other over the head. Not being aware of infringement of a patent is one thing, waiting for a competitor to use something vaguely similar to something you patented and using that to destroy any competition is quite another. Vague patents that can be applied across all iterations of a technology shouldn't exist for this very reason.

Doesn't even cover what they could sue over

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.

Yeah, personally I'd like to see some actual specific patents rather than a CEO full of hot air making baseless threats. I'm sure Seagate has patents on storage device communication, but this article offers no insight on how SSD makers could be infringing. This is like the crazy patent claims Microsoft made against Linux (what was that? 184 alleged patents? More?) Examples would be nice.

Anyhow, flash prices may be dropping, but I don't see SSDs gaining majority marketshare within the next 5 years. Developers get lazy, cameras get more mega pixels, more people need digital video. Spinning disks are still massively cheaper per GB than SSDs, and unless the price were to drop dramatically, hard disks will still have the edge to keep the throne. Laptops may see SSDs sooner due to power, but I'd imagine that one way to forestall the inevitable victory of SSD would be more intelligent caching and a larger onboard cache for hard drives.

Anyhow, Seagate is worrying about market dominance, and the Seagate CEO makes vague threats that the lawyers at Intel and Samsung probably laughed off. Not that newsworthy in my opinion. Specific patents or litigation would be very notable though.

Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over

I think you'll see SSD gain huge market share in the next 3 years. Magnetic disks will still prevail where there are huge storage needs through at least the next 5 years, but flash based storage will be cheaper and faster for storage capacities that you need to run your computer normally. I picture Dell selling computers with a 128gb flash based drive, and a 1tb magnetic drive. Laptops will be SSD exclusively.

Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over

/me points at the date

Wouldn't it look good on the quarterly if the stock price spiked toward the end? :)

And yes, likely Seagate and WD have a lot of IP that they have inter licensed or at least have an informal non-aggression pact about suing each other over (kinda like amd and intel), whether any of it is current in these days of industry wide standards like SATA, SAS, SMART etc is another thing entirely.

When it gets to the courts, THATS when it will be worth reporting on.

Re:Doesn't even cover what they could sue over

Laptops may see SSDs sooner due to power, but I'd imagine that one way to forestall the inevitable victory of SSD would be more intelligent caching and a larger onboard cache for hard drives.

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.

patents and copyrights

were originally intended to foster progress, cultural riches, innovation

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

Innovation...

When companies cannot innovate, they litigate. They work hard to slow down the market so that they can catch up.

Give me the f*cking address

Seagate May Sue if Solid State Disks Get Popular

Seagate sold me 4 of their stupid Maxtorgates (drives from the former maxtor factory) that failed immediately - and most of the replacements ALSO failed immediately.

The won't give me the address to send them the legal notice so I can sue their sorry asses off.

Their Indian tech support said "we can't do that!"

Get me the address - I want to sue on behalf of everyone who bought brand-new drives and had to pay the shipping to get replacements.

Re:Give me the f*cking address

It's part of the warranty terms with the shipping.

Anyhow, the address is: 920 Disc Dr
Scotts Valley, CA 95066-4544


Disc Drive. Ugh.

Re:Give me the f*cking address

That's the old address. The new address is 920 Solid State Dr.

Is our patent system now unconstitutional?

Quote article one:

"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.

Make love, not war

It would probably be more profitable, and better for PR, if Seagate held private meetings with the other manufacturers to discuss patents and licensing terms. Explaining the issue and offering reasonable terms would bring them serious cash. Weak threats in a public forum seems a lot less productive, unless of course they don't actually have any patents to stand on.

How much could they get?

I wonder, if Seagate successfully sued for patent infringements, how much would they actually get? I mean, if the judgment were for $30 million, they may only see $29,296,875 of it.

Is that how the IRAM-2 died?

Years back, Gigabyte released a RAM based SATA drive - the iRAM. This [google.com] is why folks were excited about it - just honking fast. It had limitations, however. 4x1G max capacity per drive, used (relatively spendy)DDR1 RAM, and apparently did not work nicely in a RAID-0 config when trying to bump the storage capacity. Still, RAM rather than flash is what I was looking for as a primary OS drive.

The next generation of IRAM [techpowerup.com] fixed my major pain point - allowing dirt cheap DDR2 RAM and allowing 8G max storage per drive. ... but it never released... (if anyone here knows of such a device, please post or email) Other drives are on the market, but they want 4 figure price tags. I don't get it. For those of us who can deal with having a hard drive that could 'evaporate' if it ran out of juice for one reason or another (disk images)...trading performance for the hassle... why did the DDR2 drives never make it out? Seagate wielding the patent stick would explain much.

This is what irks me...

We are gonna wait till it's popular, then sue. ----WTF is that, it's greed. Much like Gibson suing everyone and their mom's now that Guitar Hero is a big thing, if you have a right to something, bring it up as soon as it happens, not when you think you can maximize cash. Why is that practice even legal?

I *DARE* them to sue Intel or Samsung

Those are 2 companies that have VAST patent portfolios, I'm sure. Especially Intel.

I imagine that Seagate is violating some Intel and/or Samsung patents, in one obscure and stupid way or another. Seriously, Seagate doesn't have the juice to take on those 2 companies. Never mind that if Seagate really decides to start some shit with their hard-drive patents, I imagine that IBM will get involved, since they own most of the patents on the basic technology of hard drives. And we all know how IBM deals with people that sue them- they take no prisoners.

Re:I *DARE* them to sue Intel or Samsung

I imagine that Seagate is violating some Intel and/or Samsung patents, in one obscure and stupid way or another. Seriously, Seagate doesn't have the juice to take on those 2 companies.

And, therein lies the rub with patents.

The big players can basically play "Mutually Assured Destruction" and reach agreements where they don't sue one another. There can be no little players, and no new entrants without a huge barrier.

How does this foster innovation and moving the state of the art forward?

Cheers

Where is Intel?

Where is Intel in all this? They make the south bridge and MCH chips that talk to SATA drives. Are only Seagate and WD drives allowed to connect to them? Is Intel beholden to patent holders on the SATA interface? Why not connect future drives through USB 2/3 if SATA is patent encumbered?

The enemy of my enemy...

The enemy of my enemy ... is my friend.

If Seagate pushes hard enough, they may find this out the hard way. They may be an 800lb gorilla in the storage market. But, even a large ape does not like getting stung by a thousand bees, and Seagate is waving a stick around a number of bee hives, in my view of things.

What if, faced with a potential lawsuit from Seagate, we were to see Intel, Samsung, TI, etc., get together and develop a new standard that bypasses Seagate's IP. They could license it to each other for next to nothing... except to Seagate... no soup for you. Sure, they'd like to be safe from a backlash in the spinning media world. But, given the rapid price drops on SSD storage, at some point the SSD media will be "cheap enough" for primary storage and spinning media would be relegated to 2nd tier, archival storage. Intel certainly has the smarts and the fabrication facilities to develop a competitor to anything Seagate might come up with.

Here's an honest question I've been wondering about for a while. Why don't we use GigE or 10GigE to communicate with storage? I imagine there's more overhead than with the currently used protocols, but how much are we talking about here? I'm more of a software than hardware guy, though I know a little about the different layers in the ISO model. *waves hands*. Build in a router on the motherboard, have a port for talking to the outside world and a few ports for talking to storage. Economy of scale and the hardware would be dirt cheap... right? Since it seems like an obvious idea, I'm sure I'm missing something. Would someone who knows these things care to elaborate? Tnx!

Re:Can you sue about a "No-duh" idea?

The gap of difference between the ramdisk and SSD is wide enough to say that the 'inventions' are different even though the idea is as vastly different as say the colors on new Honda Accords in the dealer's parking lot. In such cases I am against allowing patents for something that is an extension of existing technology unless the differences are vast. Okay, here is a hard drive interface XYZ. No patent should be allowed on other hard drive interfaces unless they are vastly different, different enough to cause the obsoleting of the previous work, or compete directly with it to split the market.

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