IBM Corp finds itself at the receiving end of lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic: in the US, Conner Peripherals Inc has responded to the IBM suit by launching one of its own over proprietary power management technology, and in the UK, a police consortium set up to manage the fingerprint database used by 37 forces in England and Wales has issued a writ claiming substantial and significant damages from IBM, which developed and ran the system. Conner filed its suit on Tuesday, as soon as it was awarded the patent for a disk drive design and asks the court to bar IBM from selling disks and related products that violate the patent, including the ThinkPad and most desktop personal computers. Conner submitted the patent application for a technique that enables 2.5 and 3.5 drives to shut down when not being used and then to restart in milliseconds when needed in 1988. We put IBM on notice some time ago that this patent was about to issue, and we had evidence that it infringed on the patent, Conner said. IBM said it believes the suit is groundless. Its own 1993 suit against Conner covers 11 disk drive patents. In the UK case, the IBM fingerprint technology has been scrapped and forces have reverted to manual files while an alternative is developed by another company. The suit complains of continued and substantial breaches of contract by IBM and its Integrated Systems Solutions Co. In response, IBM accuses the forces of jeopardising public safety by overreacting and ordering fingerprint specialists to log off the database.
