SanDisk Corporation, which claims it is the original inventor of flash storage cards, has filed three patent infringement actions against the 25 most prominent companies that manufacture, sell and import USB flash drives, CompactFlash cards, multimedia cards, MP3/media players and/or other removable flash storage products, the company announced.

"These actions demonstrate SanDisk’s long-term commitment to enforcing its patents, both to protect our investment in research and development by obtaining a fair return on that investment, and out of fairness to third-parties that participate in our patent licensing program," said E. Earle Thompson, Chief Intellectual Property Counsel at SanDisk.

The legal actions are two suits in the United States District Court in the Western District of Wisconsin and a third case with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC). The flash memory maker seeks damages and a permanent injunction as well as a permanent exclusion order from the ITC banning importation of the products into the United States.

"Our goal is to resolve these matters by offering the defendants the opportunity to participate in our patent licensing program for card and system technology. Otherwise, we will aggressively pursue these actions, seeking a prompt judicial resolution awarding damages, obtaining injunctive relief and banning importation of infringing product," Thompson said.

The companies targeted include  ACP-EP Memory, A-Data, Apacer, Behavior Computer (d/b/a Emprex), Buffalo, Chipsbank, Corsair Memory, Dane-Elec, Edge, Imation/Memorex, Interactive Media (d/b/aKanguru), Kaser, Kingston, LG Electronics, Phison Electronics, PNY, PQI, Silicon Motion, Skymedi, Transcend, TSR (d/b/a T.One), USBest, Verbatim, Welldone Company and Zotek/Zodata (d/b/a Huke).

Just last week, SanDisk unveiled its TakeTV, a digital video player which can play video files downloaded from a computer on a TV set. The device is really a USB flash drive with a TV player inside and a remote.

SanDisk Corporation was previously named SunDisk, and was founded in 1988 by Eli Harari (current CEO & President) and Sanjay Mehrotra (current COO and Exec. VP), a non-volatile memory technology expert. Now it has a market capitalization of about $13 billion.