A California court has reduced the amount Western Digital (WD) must pay after it lost its court battle against SPEX Technologies. The jury originally awarded SPEX $316 million in damages, plus another $237 million in interest, after it found the storage company guilty of infringing on SPEX Patent No. 6,088,802. WD appealed the decision, and the court responded in two ways — it denied the appeal based on the company’s liability to SPEX Technologies, but reduced the amount from over half a billion dollars to just one dollar, as reported by The Register.
“Throughout this litigation, SPEX’s damages theory changed as certain evidence and theories became unavailable. At this stage, and for the reasons discussed above, there is insufficient evidence from which the Court could determine a reasonable royalty,” Judge James V. Selna wrote in his order. He also added, “Accordingly, the Court enters nominal damages in the amount of $1.”
Despite the court upholding the guilty verdict, the plaintiff was unable to prove the dollar value that it lost, resulting in the massive reduction in awards. This happened because the testimony of SPEX’s damages expert was excluded from the trial; thus, the plaintiff had to rely on non-expert witnesses to prove the value it lost because of Western Digital’s infringement.
Since the expert analysis on behalf of SPEX was thrown out, the court decided that it could not grant the $553 million. It has given the plaintiff seven days to respond from June 16, 2025, but the company has yet to release a statement about the issue.
Even though Western Digital lost the case, and it was considered to have infringed on the SPEX patent with its Ultrastar, My Book, and My Passport line of storage drives, the company still considers this decision a massive win, as it’s essentially getting away scot-free from the patent infringement case.
However, this isn’t the only court case the storage company is facing, where hundreds of millions of dollars are on the line. It also lost another patent infringement case in August 2024, when the courts awarded a German scientist $262 million because it was found guilty of using HDD recording technologies that increased drive density by up to three times. The case is currently still on appeal, so we will have to wait until the courts decide to see if WD will have to pay or if it will walk away clean.
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