Seagate Allegedly Stole MIT Research

Even though legal disputes have a tendency to die out in very anticlimactic ways, with most lawsuits ending up being settled through a financial agreement, situations sometimes arise when decade-old legal battles are revitalized. In this instance, an ex-employee of Seagate is refreshing a legal action, initially filed by the MIT spin-off Convolve as far back as 2000, through what is legally dubbed as an eye-witness account of the alleged illegal activities performed by the leading hard drive producer.

The U.S District Court affidavit, which has the potential to change the course of the Convolve-Seagate battle contains the account of Paul A. Galloway. This account describes how Seagate achieved the supposed theft and how it subsequently used the Convolve research in its own Sound Barrier Technology. According to the ex-employee, the company violated the non disclosure agreement it had with the MIT spin-off.

“I was deceived by my management’s failure to tell me that the Convolve technology discussed within Seagate was NDA protected,” Mr. Galloway said in a section of the affidavit reproduced by Ms. Debra Brown Steinberg, one of the lawyers at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft representing M.I.T. “If I had known about Convolve’s NDA with Seagate, I would not have worked on competing technology.”

Galloway was initially a witness for Seagate in the protracted litigation but now claims to have switched sides because he had been, as already stated, misled. The information was supposedly obtained by Seagate during meetings held between 1998 and 1999. Galloway also says that his former employer destroyed the software blueprints related to the Convolve technology in order to hide (or, in this case, remove) the evidence. He adds that the computer containing his personal notes on the technology was removed.

An interesting note is that Convolve is in the middle of a similar patent infringement legal action against Dell, Western Digital and Hitachi.

Neither Seagate's spokesperson nor Galloway's lawyers commented on the matter.