Heres the Lexar suit:
sandisk.com
The patent, "Flash EEPROM System" (U.S. patent 5,602,987) was issued Feb. 11, 1997.
SanDisk officials said they have been in cross-licensing negotiations with Lexar but that the two companies
were unable to come to an agreement. They also said that customers who buy Lexar products and
customers who build electronic products with Lexar devices may also be infringing patent 5,602,987.
Eli Harari, SanDisk CEO and president, said, "Lexar is using Sandisk's patented innovations in an attempt
to unfairly appropriate some of SanDisk's business. Since our formation in 1988, we have invested
hundreds of man years and over $40 million to develop the flash storage card market with the underlying
technology. We have offered a patent cross-licensing agreement to Lexar under reasonable terms, but Lexar has rejected the agreement. SanDisk has no alternative but to vigorously protect our intellectual
property rights through the legal system.
"In the last two years, we have signed patent cross-licensing agreements with Intel, Sharp, Hitachi,
Samsung and Toshiba. Our strategy has been and is to license our patents to enable an open, competitive market for flash cards."
The patent teaches and claims important aspects of the emulation of a magnetic disk drive in removable flash memory cards, the so called flashdisk and CompactFlash. The removable flashdisk memory card claimed in the patent appears to the computer, digital camera or digital recorder to be completely identical to the industry standard magnetic disk drive although the flash memory is solid state, has no moving parts, is extremely compact and rugged and consumes negligible battery power. Therefore it is ideally suited to be a universal digital storage device.
SanDisk, a pioneering technology company in the flash memory market, holds more than 70 related
patents. |
