Editing Binary prefix (section)

=== Legal disputes ===
The different interpretations of disk size prefixes led to class action lawsuits against digital storage manufacturers. These cases involved both flash memory and hard disk drives.

==== Early cases ====
Early cases (2004–2007) were settled prior to any court ruling with the manufacturers admitting no wrongdoing but agreeing to clarify the storage capacity of their products on the consumer packaging. Accordingly, many flash memory and hard disk manufacturers have disclosures on their packaging and web sites clarifying the formatted capacity of the devices or defining MB as 1&nbsp;million bytes and 1&nbsp;GB as 1&nbsp;billion bytes.<ref name="wdc2007" /><ref name="flash2016" /><ref name="sand2013" /><ref name="sd-cap-disclaimer" />

==== ''Willem Vroegh v. Eastman Kodak Company'' ====
On 20 February 2004, [[Vroegh v. Eastman Kodak Co.|Willem Vroegh filed a lawsuit]] against Lexar Media, Dane–Elec Memory, [[Fujifilm|Fuji Photo Film USA]], [[Eastman Kodak]] Company, Kingston Technology Company, Inc., [[Memorex]] Products, Inc.; [[PNY Technologies]] Inc., [[SanDisk|SanDisk Corporation]], [[Verbatim Corporation]], and [[Viking Interworks]] alleging that their descriptions of the capacity of their [[flash memory]] cards were false and misleading.

Vroegh claimed that a 256&nbsp;MB Flash Memory Device had only 244&nbsp;MB of accessible memory. "Plaintiffs allege that Defendants marketed the memory capacity of their products by assuming that one megabyte equals one million bytes and one gigabyte equals one billion bytes." The plaintiffs wanted the defendants to use the customary values of 1024<sup>2</sup> for megabyte and 1024<sup>3</sup> for gigabyte. The plaintiffs acknowledged that the IEC and IEEE standards define a MB as one million bytes but stated that the industry has largely ignored the IEC standards.<ref name="vreo2005" />

The parties agreed that manufacturers could continue to use the decimal definition so long as the definition was added to the packaging and web sites.<ref name="sand2012" /> The consumers could apply for "a discount of ten percent off a future online purchase from Defendants' Online Stores Flash Memory Device".<ref name="safi2007" />

==== ''Orin Safier v. Western Digital Corporation'' ====
On 7 July 2005, an action entitled ''Orin Safier v. [[Western Digital]] Corporation, et al.'' was filed in the Superior Court for the City and County of San Francisco, Case No. CGC-05-442812. The case was subsequently moved to the Northern District of California, Case No. 05-03353 BZ.<ref name="gutr2006" />

Although Western Digital maintained that their usage of units is consistent with "the indisputably correct industry standard for measuring and describing storage capacity", and that they "cannot be expected to reform the software industry", they agreed to settle in March 2006 with 14 June 2006 as the Final Approval hearing date.<ref name="zimm2006" />

Western Digital offered to compensate customers with a [[Gratis versus libre#Gratis|gratis]] download of backup and recovery software that they valued at US$30. They also paid {{val|p=$|500000}} in fees and expenses to San Francisco lawyers Adam Gutride and Seth Safier, who filed the suit. The settlement called for Western Digital to add a disclaimer to their later packaging and advertising.<ref name="betaxxxx" /><ref name="reim2006" /><ref name="wdc2010" />
<!--- I think that to end on this bit is overly POV. I'll leave it to someone else to add. – jeh--->
Western Digital had this footnote in their settlement. "Apparently, Plaintiff believes that he could sue an egg company for fraud for labeling a carton of 12 eggs a 'dozen', because some bakers would view a 'dozen' as including 13 items."<ref name="bask2006" />

==== ''Cho v. Seagate Technology (US) Holdings, Inc.'' ====
A lawsuit (''Cho v. Seagate Technology (US) Holdings, Inc.'', San Francisco Superior Court, Case No. CGC-06-453195) was filed against [[Seagate Technology]], alleging that Seagate overrepresented the amount of usable storage by 7% on hard drives sold between 22 March 2001 and 26 September 2007. The case was settled without Seagate admitting wrongdoing, but agreeing to supply those purchasers with gratis backup software or a 5% refund on the cost of the drives.<ref name="seagb2011" />

==== ''Dinan et al. v. SanDisk LLC'' ====
On 22 January 2020, the district court of the Northern District of California ruled in favor of the defendant, [[SanDisk]], upholding its use of "GB" to mean {{val|1000000000|u=bytes}}.<ref name="suitbxxxx" />