Western Digital loses over $310 million lawsuit for patent infringement — the data security patent used in PCMCIA and Compact Flash cards

According to Reuters, Western Digital has been ordered to pay $315.7 million in damages for violating a patent related to data encryption technology owned by SPEX Technologies. The patents originate from the company Spyrus and largely cover data encryption technologies originally used in PCMCIA and Compact Flash devices.

A California federal jury found that several of Western Digital’s self-encrypting storage devices infringed on a patent owned by SPEX Technologies, which acquired patents from a company called Spyrus. According to Reuters, Western Digital plans to contest the decision.

The lawsuit dates back to 2016 when SPEX sued Western Digital for allegedly infringing on a patent acquired from Spyrus. This company developed encryption technology to secure sensitive communications for various storage devices. The patents in question are the US6088802A and US6003135A, and both essentially enable a peripheral device to communicate with a host computing device to enable one or more security operations.

“The invention enables a peripheral device to communicate with a host computing device to enable one or more security operations to be performed by the peripheral device on data stored within the host computing device,” a description of the ‘802 patent reads.

Both patents are dated 1997. They essentially cover the operations of devices over a secure protocol, which pretty much covers everything that has interconnections to do something like this. Both patents applied to PCMCIA (a now-extinct standard) and Compact Flash cards. They expired in 2017, but the lawsuits had been filed before that date, which is why they were apparently given a go.

Western Digital denies the allegations of patent infringement and has expressed strong disagreement with the verdict. According to Reuters, the company plans to appeal the ruling through post-trial motions and is prepared to appeal the decision if necessary.

Reuters says this is not the first time Western Digital has faced such legal trouble. In a separate case earlier in July, another jury in the same California court ruled that the company owed over $262 million for infringing patents related to increasing hard drive storage capacity.