These definitions are domain-independent and much older than any computer. There are international standards for this. The so-called harddrive vendor conspiracy is an urban legend. HDDs were always sold using the correct meanings of megabyte and gigabyte, same goes for DVDs, tapes, BluRay disks. Likewise, 1 Mbit is 1000000 bit, 1 kHz is 1000 Hz. The use of K (pronounced kay not kilo) as 1024 was always meant as an approximation and used for convenience in low-level programming but it’s completely irrelevant for high-level use and especially for end-users.

In the US legal system, every party has to pay for their costs. So even if you are innocent, you might end up with a huge bill especially as lawyer costs are calculated depending on what’s at stake. So it’s often economically smart to give in and pay some peanuts instead of risking the increased costs. Also in this case, Seagate would clearly suffer by winning the case unless they pay the losers bill too. Just to repeat, they did not lose the case, there was no decision by any judge, Seagate agreed to a settlement. It’s pretty unfair anyway because Seagate does not label their disks any different than any other vendors like IBM, Western Digital, Hitachi, Samsung etc. and to repeat all of them label disks correctly. Sue Microsoft, Apple and whoever if you have a problem with their software displaying incorrect information.