Posted on 12/31/2004 9:51:33 AM PST by Pussy_Cat
HONG KONG, Dec 29 (Reuters) - The hard disk drive manufacturing joint venture between Hitachi Ltd. and IBM said on Wednesday it has sued Chinese firm Magicstor Inc., saying it had made multiple patent infringements. In the suit filed in United States District Court, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies seeks monetary damages and a permanent injunction barring Magicstor from making and selling the allegedly infringing products.
A spokeswoman at Magicstor, located in the interior Chinese city of Guiyang, had no immediate comment.
The suit names Magicstor, its Chinese parent company, GS Magic Inc. and California-based Riospring Inc., according to a statement released by Hitachi GST.
According to its Web site, GS Magicstor is a hard disk drive maker that was founded in 2002 "as the first small form factor manufacturer with its own intellectual property rights."
The filing of patent infringement lawsuits in the United States against Chinese firms has become a relatively common strategy by plaintiffs wary of using China's fledgling patent protection system.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) the world's biggest contract maker of semiconductor chips, is using the tactic in its lawsuit against Shanghai-based rival Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC) .
Last year, Cisco Systems , the world's biggest maker of routers and switches used in telecoms networks, also used a U.S.-based lawsuit when it accused Huawei Technologies, China's largest telecoms equipment maker, of copyright infringement.
Welcome to FR
recollections of freedom, commerce, 'n common law pages of a week or so ago
The chinese have zero respect for intellectul rights.
My conjectural hypothesis (contracts besides): Trying to wake up the U.S. government to the massive intellectual property fleecing China is doing, by forcibly presenting them with a judicial fait accomplice...right under our nose, so to speak. Seeking a decree they can't just blithely ignore, by holding meaningless government conferences, where words, not deeds, are extracted, and then issue a rubber-stamp "everything is settled" diplomatic statement...when nothing is done. No follow-up. It is all just words.
At a guess, an adverse judgement would bar China from selling the products in the US, probably the largest consumer of the goods. The US is also fairly rare in being a "First to Invent" rather than "First to File" country, so the case is probably cleaner, with more easily demonstrated priority.
We (Inventors, engineers, patent agents, etc.) know that Far East patents or World Patents designating some of these countries are a joke, anyway. Few companies want to tell their stockholders they are going to be paying Fish&Richardson $300/hour plus open-ended airfare for the international version of Polaroid vs. Kodak, that dragged on for a generation!
In addition, some countries like New Zealand have let us know they are not happy with the results of the last election, and communications from their examiners reflect this, with frivolous, inappropriate, and irrelevant Prior Art cited, strange delays, etc..etc..
So for a US company (Or a company with a substantial US Presence) to pursue an action, one must be prepared to throw a LOT of money down a rat-hole.
Another reason they could have chosen the US is that our patent laws are reasonably current with High Technology issues.
This somewhat reminds me of the technology products that are barred from export from the US - including to China - yet is actually manufactured in China....
Thanks ^_^
It's a national disgrace, and has put millions of Americans out of work.
Why bother to spend the time to conceive of, design, and engineer something knowing you will never reap any reward for your all your effort because the Chinese will simply steal your work and sell it back to you at a discount?
After all, the whole idea of "free trade" with developing countries is technology, know-how, jobs, and wealth (FDI) transfers ain't it? Where are they?
I agree with you, but I am not for Tariffs for the Rich, the remnant, after the battles and blood that has flowed, so that they can hang on to their property.
They, who are belly-aching for the protection of their intellectual property, at this point.
It was fine with them, as stockholders, to close plants and lay off workers over the last decade, in the name of seeking profits thru cheaply made parts and sub-assemblies.
No principles would prevent such a "it's good for the economy" plan of short-term thinking.
Then and now, we should stick to their short-sightedness and let the outsourcing bubble burst; if there be down for you and me, there shall be for them, too.
If noo tariff to protect some plant in North Carolina, then no tariff to protect some thoughtless owner of intellectual property who suddenly finds that now, his property is threatened.
We are either going to protect Americans' property or not; instead of everybody's property being protected equally and some more equally than others, which is the case now in the courts.
Indeed, as you know, I am for protecting American property, and that includes tariffs and avoidance of "international non-governmental despository exchanges for the purposes of meeting beyond the laws of the United States."
We make deals as needed, meeting demand and supply, customers and suppliers, and that is it.
We should not have some U.N. of Business in which deal making avoids the light of day ... only the made-for-TV viewing - headlines are printed in words defying the clever monetary purposes affected by Harvard Business School Hooligans.
We are either protecting our property by respecting our laws about property, or we shall all lose --- and that includes the intellectual property holders.
Your mini-mill producing steel in southern Kentucky is just as valuable as the music that the workers enjoy. Is another way of putting it.
In the United States, the largest chunk of property owned by limousine liberals, is intellectual property.
I am not going to OK their fortune while our neighbors' capital and property is destroyed by Wall Street's greed. We cannot last as some financial exchange for industry beyond our neighborhoods.
So, the limousine set howls. Let 'em. They may begin to understand that they who most make noise about "caring," could have cared less.
Remember "Farm Aid?" Where is Factory Aid?
They did not care. Not even Michael Moore.
They want their songs and their bright ideas behind walls, affected by judge-made-tariffs, and distributed by their own underground economy.
Along with them, via the same law firms, are the short-term thinkers, the cash flow artists, but also, some old money that now finds its rents and royalties threatened, gray-headed types sitting upright (this means Ted Kennedy, actually; and the Ford Foundation, as another example). They have spent a lot of time carefully pruning their collections. Now, oops, cheap knock-offs threaten to devalue such estates.
Somehow, they thought their kingdoms would manage a feasible comfort through the travails of the industrial peasantry.
For some time, in America, we have dreamed of the possiblities and we have worked to achieve a better life, and many of us have not spent nor wasted time on the fact that some guy is the more wealthy. We would, no matter what, aim high and keep at it. We thanked God for the opportunities and still do.
Yet we are confronted by barriers of our own making, by our own failure to fight to maintain such possibilities. Your new manufacturing plant, you could protect with much the same effort as your new song. Each possibility was within your grasp, as long as you kept on toward your goals, and we defended our rights.
I don't quite see that such largesse by ordinary Americans, can now survive well enough to keep afloat, an environment of our common law, upon which intellectual property will get a fair day in court.
I cannot picture a favorable outcome in local court in re intellectual property rights, for a plant owner who closed the doors 2.1 years ago and said, "I'm sorry." at the last employees meeting ... then later, actually now, to be found in a story of the local newspaper, in which case the owner is now suing some Chinese company that is making knock-offs of his idea, in China, right down the street from the plant that he went to, 2.1 years ago, to make his product, the same product that he used to make, here.
Now, his neighbors, who he laid off, and who are asked by the court to sit in judgement, are to be reminded of his words about "free trade" and "NAFTA" and "no barriers" and other such vapors and bubbles from the Wall Street Journal ... now, they are to accept his argument that his ideas, his intellectual property should be protected.
When the principle is, that we mutually agreed to protect each other, and so it was, that I warned him, we shall both fall, if he did not make a stand, back then.
Well, I am for the protection of our property, and despite my losses, I would again suggest to him, that we mutually sacrifice. I would make the offer, but now he must foot the cost, because we are broke.
Which future he would not dare to imagine when he examined the short-term cash flow projections over two years ago.
Will be the story.
Mike
But I was not thinking of protecting "factory owners" but more of the individuals like the two little old ladies who invented icicle Christmas lights...
Good comments. Thanks.
Despite what some think the Rats are not without "blame." The 20th century liberal Democrat may be against losing technology, jobs, etc. but the DLC New Democrat Third Way Democrat progressives are very much for "free trade" transfers of technology, investment (wealth), etc. to developing nations ("emerging markets"). ("Raise everyone's boat")
PBS's Commanding Heights, Episode Three: The New Rules of the Game*
Discusses the origins of the global free-market during the Clinton Administration. It's a very interesting account of events affecting global economics during the 1990s.
Excerpts [My emphasis]
BILL CLINTON: I favored a very aggressive policy. I thought the emerging countries -- both emerging economically and those that were new democracies -- had a better chance to do well economically and politically if the wealthier countries opened our borders and made trade agreements with them, and if in turn they opened their borders not only to trade, but to investment. I thought that economic policy and traditional foreign policy would tend to merge. . .
LAURA TYSON, Chair of the U.S. National Economic Council, 1993-1995: This is how it worked. If you go back to the first term, a lot of the international approach of the administration on economic issues was to break down barriers to U.S. firms. We are going to engage our trading partners and encourage, cajole, or convince them to bring down their barriers. . .
BILL CLINTON: First let me say I think it's quite important that we unapologetically reaffirm a conviction that open markets and rule-based trade are necessary, proven engines of economic growth. Now I know that many people don't believe that, and I know that inequality, as I said in the last few years, has increased in many nations, but the answer is not to abandon the path of expanded trade, but instead to do whatever is necessary to build a new consensus on trade. And it's easy for me to say --you can see how successful I was in Seattle at doing that. No generation has ever had the opportunity that all of us now have to build a global economy that leaves no one behind. For eight years I have done what I could to lead my country down that path. I think for the rest of our lives we had all better stay on it. Thank you very much. [End excerpts]
My comments. The point these DLC New Democrat Clinton Third Way progressives are all for it -- for whatever reason. See how proud they are of bringing down barriers and making trade possible.
I personally think that they and their international comrades are using globalization as a Marxist revolution from the top down. The "free traders" transferring U.S. technology, know-how, jobs, wealth to the "emerging markets" (developing nations) are the progressives' useful idiots.
As years pass and the useful idiots lose more and more I advise them that when the progressives ask them, got rope to sell?
Run!
The intention of the leftists, is to establish a trade exchange outside the laws of the United States, in avoidance of all but the most ceremonial of treaties. That is, to supplant the treaty making powers and others of the Executive Branch, with a, as you say, "third way" subject to foreign and international laws, making a path for such lawyers and leftists, back into our communities.
No thanks.
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