A Patent Suit Vs. All HDD Manufacturers

Two U.S. members of the University of Texas in Dallas, Carl B. Collins, professor, and Farzin Davanloo, research scientist, filed a suit last July 15 in the U.S. District Court of Texas Marshall Division against the cream of the storage companies. Look at that: Seagate, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Toshiba and WD, all of them HDD manufacturers, but also against companies reselling their drives, not all of them, but choosing some big names: EMC, Buffalo, LaCie, Imation, CompUSA, J & R Electronics, and TigerDirect.

The plaintiffs estimate that these firms infringed a patent on the use of diamond-like coating to manufacture hard disks. This patent, entitled "Nanophase Diamond Films" (No. 5,478,650) was issued on December 26, 1995 by the United States Patent & Trademark.

Editor’s note: We got this scoop thanks to Francis Pelletier, chief redactor of French magazine MOS.