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STEC Official Response to Patent Infringement Claims from Seagate

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STEC, a designer, manufacturer and marketer of high performance solid state drives (SSDs), announced today that it has received notice of a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Seagate Technology LLC, Seagate Technology International, Seagate Singapore International Headquarters Pte. Ltd. and Maxtor Corporation in United States District Court, Northern District of California, alleging infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,404,647 (issued in 2002), 6,849,480 (issued in 2005), 6,336,174 (issued in 2002) and 7,042,664 (issued in 2006).


STEC is one of the first companies to build SSDs, having designed, manufactured and shipped SSDs as early as 1994, long before any of the suggested patents were issued to Seagate. Given the effect SSDs are having on the HDD market, STEC believes that Seagate's lawsuit is completely without merit and primarily motivated by competitive concerns rather than a desire to protect its intellectual property. 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. Seagate is sending a clear signal that it recognizes STEC as the leader in the SSD business and is attempting to slow down part of the growth that STEC is gaining through its SSD offering, particularly in the enterprise segment. STEC will aggressively pursue its defense to this infringement action.

In addition, STEC will also closely examine the patents asserted by Seagate as STEC believes it held such technology including prior patents, dating more than a decade prior to any of Seagate's patents. Although STEC is in the process of analyzing the claims in this lawsuit, STEC believes that Seagate's asserted patents pertain to technologies where STEC has years of prior experience and/or patents. STEC has significant patents related to SSD which have been developed through the decades of experience STEC has with developing, manufacturing and shipping SSDs. Beyond that long history, STEC also believes that many of Seagate's claims are not relevant to SSD. For example, STEC was one of the originators of stacking technology with patents dating back to the mid-1990s, while Seagate's patent on this matter was issued in 2005.

Through this process, STEC will determine if Seagate is misappropriating any of STEC's core technologies; STEC will take appropriate action to protect its interests, including seeking the invalidation of Seagate's patents.

"Throughout our 18 year history, STEC has been diligent in its pursuit of industry-changing technology while entirely respectful of the intellectual property that has been developed by others. The allegation put forth by Seagate in recently published articles that STEC '...ha(s) stolen (its) patents,' is simply not accurate nor in line with STEC's long history of success and fair play in these markets," said Manouch Moshayedi, chairman and CEO of STEC. "In fact, STEC believes these allegations are in response to the competitive threat that we as a leading developer of innovative SSD technologies pose to the HDD industry. We view this action as Seagate's attempt to slow down the growth that STEC's SSD business is experiencing, particularly in the enterprise segment. We have a high degree of confidence in STEC's intellectual property portfolio."

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so stec patented stacking flash wafers well before seagate, interesting. fark i wonder who wins out of this, quite a good read thx malware :)
 
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Wow... a patent case that isn't filed in Marshall, Texas... :wtf:
 
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The article makes it sound like STEC is taking a very well mannered and respectful approach to the matter. It's an anticipated respomse. It will be interesting to see what the courts have to say. Like I said before, with patent cases you have to wait until the end before you really know for sure who the bad guy is.
 
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Good. I'm all the way with STEC on this. I hope they crush Seagate with an overwhelming victory.
 
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This one should be interesting. If STEC does in fact have patents some where in the world this will set a precedence about the whole international patent thing. It sounds like Seagate did a USA patent and STEC did a patent quite a while ago in another country ("a" being figurative, I know there were multiple patents on both sides). I think for this fact alone this one may be intense.

Technically though if this is true. Seagate has the rights in the US and STEC has the rights in another country. By the law, however ethically its a different story.

Did anyone else notice how STEC only attacked/rebuttaled the SSD patent infringements, not the other two allegations?
 
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