History 2000: Seagate Pays as Much as $45 Million to Rodime

The Scottish firm Rodime, a former manufacturer of 3.5-inch HDDs now become a full-time royalty chaser, had already hit up Conner Peripherals, Fujitsu, IBM, Alps, Hitachi, Matsushita, Mini-Scribe/Maxtor, invoking its patents on 3.5-inch form factor devices.

All were forced to dip into the till, except Quantum and Seagate.

The legal battles with the latter began in November 18, 1992. After lengthy, multiple trials, and most recently, Seagate’s failure to obtain a Supreme Court hearing, the drive manufacturer agreed to settle the patent infringement complaint by paying Rodime, in a wire order placed January 28, the consequential sum of $45 million.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 145 on February 2000 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.