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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Craig Freeman who wrote (10130)	4/4/2000 9:08:00 PM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

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

To: Craig Freeman who wrote (10130)	4/4/2000 10:04:00 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60323

Craig, thanks for your insights into the motivation behind the M patent challenge. If there were something serious here, I think Mitsubishi would have pursued its case in the U.S., thereby opening up markets here. They may want to ensure a captive market in Japan, but what if people start ordering Japanese cameras without ANY memory card and then add the card when the camera is sold in the U.S.? Contrast this to the Texas Instruments case on integrated circuits several years ago. Texas Instruments sued the Japanese on their home ground and won big time. They also sued U.S. companies and won. I'd be very surprised if this latest challenge goes anywhere. Certainly it has little, if any impact on the recent price fluctuations of SNDK. Art