Western Digital Loses Patent Lawsuit and Must Pay Over 262.3 Million US Dollars

TapTechNews August 15th news, according to comprehensive foreign media reports such as Reuters and Blocks&Files, a local federal court in California, the United States, ruled on July 30 local time that Western Digital lost in a patent lawsuit and should pay more than 262.3 million US dollars (TapTechNews note: currently about 1.874 billion Chinese yuan) in compensation.

The plaintiff in this lawsuit, MRTechnologie, accused Western Digital of infringing on two US patents of Dieter Suess, the owner of MRTechnologie company, a professor and head of the Department of Functional Materials Physics at the University of Vienna.

The US patent numbers of these two patents are 11138997 and 9928864 respectively, and both are named Multilayer exchange spring recording media, which are both related to materials that can overcome the writability problem of vertical recording media.

MRTechnologie accused Western Digital of massively abusing Dieter Suess's patents since 2018 to achieve a significant increase in the data density per surface of mechanical hard drives. Western Digital claimed that it used different technologies to increase the storage density and believed that the patents involved of Dieter Suess were invalid.

Western Digital stated in a statement that the company will file an appeal against the result of this lawsuit as soon as possible.