DEC threatens suits on disk, tape links

Electronic News, April 27, 1992 by Craig Stedman

MAYNARD, MASS. -- Digital Equipment Corp. last week began another storage-related legal offensive, threatening to file lawsuits against an unspecified number of third-party peripherals vendors that it claims are illegally using the DSSI disk and tape interconnect technology.

Charles Christ, vice president in charge of mass storage, workstations and other product lines at DEC, said the company could start bringing suits within three to six months against targeted third-party outfits that don't agree to pay it royalties under a new DSSI licensing program.

"If people choose not to license and continue to infringe our intellectual property, we would of course consider other legal alternatives," he noted. More than 15 vendors are alleged to be infringing on DSSI patents, although Mr. Christ would not disclose an exact count.

The DSSI program joins an ongoing legal campaign started last spring against companies that were using reverse-engineered versions of DEC's other proprietary storage interconnect, known as SDI on the disk side and STI for tape units. Both buses support DEC's VAX computer line, with the higher-end SDI/STI technology geared to systems with large storage capacities and DSSI typically aimed at smaller configurations.

While DEC has demanded that storage devices interfacing to the SDI/STI bus be phased out by the end of this year, it said DSSI-based products would be allowed to remain on the market. As a result, DSSI licenses are being made available to any outside vendor, and in fact the first outside vendor, and in fact the first licensee, CMD Technology Inc. of Irvine, Calif., hasn't been using the DSSI bus and was not being targeted by DEC for any potential litigation.

However, Jan Jaferian, director of DEC's corporate licensing office, noted explicitly that the DSSI program was primarily set up as a form of "enforcement licensing" aimed at getting royalty payments from companies that "have trepassed on our property rights."

As a concrete sign of that, Ms. Jaferian added that the royalty rates being proposed by DEC would increase after an unspecified period of time for vendors that don't immediately agree to take licenses. "The later people delay signing, the more expensive a license will be," she said.

DEC would not say how large a royalty it hopes to impose, with Mr. Christ describing the company's initial offer only as "fairly reasonable" from a percentage standpoint. Both he and Ms. Jaferian declined to disclose revenue projections for the licensing program.

In addition, Mr. Christ would not comment on why the company chose to let DSSI-based devices continue to be marketed after insisting on the SDI/STI phase-out, beyond saying that executives "obviously saw differences" between the situations of the two buses.

He did note that DEC is trying to get the committee responsible for the industry-standard SCSI interconnect to adopt part of the DSSI technology related to protecting data integrity at high-performance levels. IBM is supporting that effort, which began "a few months back," he added.

The SCSI bus is becoming critical to DEC due to its plans to develop a full line of storage devices based on that technology (EN, Jan. 13). That strategy leaves the long-term future of both DSSI and SDI/STI somewhat up in the air, although Mr. Christ reiterated that he plans to continue using the proprietary interfaces "as long as it makes sense."