IBM Corp yesterday filed a new lawsuit against Comdisco Inc that accuses the leasing giant of producing counterfeit parts for IBM mainframe computers and then selling or leasing them to unsuspecting customers as genuine IBM-manufactured parts. The suit alleges that the practice is cheating customers and damaging IBM’s reputation and suggests that the Rosemont, Illinois company has engaged in a deliberate programme of surreptitiously disassembling IBM-manufactured memory cards and using these cannibalised parts to build counterfeit memory cards for 3090 computers. The suit seeks a preliminary injunction, a subsequent permanent bar on the practice, and monetary damages. The company alleges that Comdisco put unauthorised IBM part numbers on the boards to make them appear original IBM parts. As well as not having undergone IBM testing procedures, IBM suggests that the boards have been subject to heat, moisture, chemical and various other stresses, that they therefore have existing and latent defects, and that some have already failed and others are likely to fail. IBM Credit Corp issued a statement saying that it will replace any counterfeit memory at no charge to customers in instances where it mistakenly transferred the counterfeit memory. It says it believes these instances will be few in number, since IBM Credit policies prohibit parts substitution but that since the counterfeit memory is not readily detectable, IBM and IBM Credit do not know all the customer locations where the bogus memory is installed, adding IBM Credit may have unknowingly provided some customers with counterfeit memory as a consequence of third parties installing it on IBM Credit-owned systems that were subsequently returned to IBM Credit at lease-end. IBM Credit and its customers were victimised by the third party by this activity its says. IBM does not know whether the circuit boards at issue were assembled by Comdisco or a third party retained by the leasing firm. Comdisco had not responded to the allegations by the time we closed for press last night.
