Craig, I do no think that the patent is on "disk drive emulation", it is on the enabling technology with which some emulation can be achieved. You cannot go and get a patent on a solid sate DRAM (or any RAM) having a a capacity of terabyte, unless you teach the rest of the world an enabling technology to make such a chip. Not that I am saying that all SNDK's patent will hold or are even valid (I have seen patents granted by the PTO on devices violating the third law of thermodynamics), but the fact that people were dreaming about emulating disk drive does not make the actual embodiment public domain.
Take the patent on "intermitent wind shield wipers", stepper motors were known before and so were windshield wipers, yet, this patent withstood the most severe assault of a coalition of the big three and survived, there was no intermittent wind shield wiper before, and then, suddenly, by combining very simple well known prior art, new art was formed (and the inventor got $56 MM or so plus royalties for his effort, well, his great lawyer probably got 1/3, but in this case, he surely earned it <VBG>).
Zeev |
