SanDisk filed three patent-infringement lawsuits against 25 companies that make, sell or import USB flash drives and other removable flash storage products yesterday, seeking damages and a permanent exclusion order from the U.S. International Trade Commission banning importation of infringing products into the United States.

SanDisk hasn’t yet disclosed publicly the patent(s) at issue here–and there are certainly a number of possibilities– but No. 5,602,987, Flash EEprom system may be one of them. After all, the company has used it for these purposes before.

Anyway … Among those on the receiving end of SanDisk’s suit: LG Electronics, Buffalo, Corsair, Kingston, Verbatim Transcend and Imation/Memorex. “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,” E. Earle Thompson, chief intellectual property counsel at SanDisk, said in a statement, noting that defendants named in SanDisk’s suits would be offered the chance to participate in its patent-licensing program. “Otherwise, we will aggressively pursue these actions, seeking a prompt judicial resolution awarding damages, obtaining injunctive relief and banning importation of infringing product.”

“After extensive review, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has advised that it does not believe there are public-safety risks sufficient to justify disapproval of the USITC’s limited exclusion order,” U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab wrote in her decision. “DHS has also advised that Broadcom Corporation’s offer of royalty-free public-safety licensing to state and local public safety organizations and its licensing agreements with two major wireless carriers will ameliorate to a significant degree concerns regarding the order’s potential effect on public-safety wireless broadband systems and 3G network deployment. We also understand that other market participants are investigating the use of a noninfringing software workaround. We believe that such licensing agreements and workarounds will address in large part the concerns raised about delay in 3G network deployment.”

Quite a nasty turn of events for Qualcomm. The company had lobbied–fiercely–for White House intervention to reverse the ITC ruling, arguing that allowing it to remain would harm consumers, telecom carriers and handset makers. But the administration apparently didn’t buy it, and without the sort of deus ex machina it could have offered, Qualcomm is nearly out of options. It is facing an immediate ban on all forthcoming handsets running its WCDMA and EVDO chips–a potentially devastating blow to the company’s hugely important chip IP licensing business.

“If I’m one of Qualcomm’s customers, I’m furious,” Gartner analyst Michael King told the Associated Press. “My product line has the potential to be disrupted. The merits of the case notwithstanding, the fact they let it get this far is going to be somewhat unconscionable to their customers.”

Qualcomm, which is working on a software workaround to avoid any infringement on the Broadcom technology in question, is pursuing a stay of the ITC ban. Third time’s a charm, right?