SPRINGFIELD – Supreme Court Justices decided not to review rejection of a claim that a gigabyte equals 1,024 megabytes rather than 1,000.
On Jan. 27, they denied leave to appeal an appellate court ruling that Walgreens properly advertised 1,000 megabytes of flash drive capacity as one gigabyte.
Plaintiff Brian O’Keefe sued Walgreens in St. Clair County circuit court in March 2019, claiming its flash drive packages violated Illinois consumer fraud law.
“All defendant does is place an asterisk on the number of GBs advertised and extremely fine print on the back of its packaging that arbitrarily defines GB as one billion bytes,” his complaint alleged.
He proposed to represent a consumer class.
Walgreens moved to dismiss the complaint, and attached a notice that the National Institute of Standards and Technology published in the Federal Register in 1998.
It stated that G prefixes strictly represented powers of ten and that using G to represent powers of two was inappropriate.
Walgreens attached a guide the institute published in 2008, to the same effect.
Former St. Clair County circuit judge Stephen McGlynn heard argument and dismissed the complaint in September 2019.
Fifth District appellate judges affirmed McGlynn last August, finding he properly took judicial notice of information in the Federal Register.
Attorneys David Sudzus of Chicago and Anthony Weibell of Palo Alto, Calif. represented Walgreens.
Attornehys James Rosemergy of Clayton, Mo. and Tiffany Yiatras of Ellisville, Mo. represented O’Keefe.