[JTND] Ex-Toshiba Employee seeks 1 Billion Yen for Flash MemoryPatent

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From Kyodo Wire Service
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/040302/kyodo/d8124l180.html

A former Toshiba Corp. employee filed a suit Tuesday with the Tokyo
District Court demanding 1 billion yen from the electronics giant in
connection with the invention of the flash memory semiconductor, which
he claimed is his creation.  Fujio Masuoka, now a professor at Tohoku
University, demanded the sum for his transfer to Toshiba of the patent
rights to the device, which he said he developed while working for the
company.

[Last month, Tokyo District Court awarded 20 billion yen to Professor
Shuji Nakamura of UCSB who invented Blue LED(light-emitting diode)
while he worked for a Japanese company. Professor Masuoka is known as
the inventor of NAND flash memory, which is widely used in digital
cameras, MP3 players and other electronic devices. He told a Japanese
newspaper that his invention would be worth 100 times more than
Namamura's because of its market size. Toshiba paid him approximately
fifty thousand yen when his invention got patents. There is a nice
article about him in Forbes.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0722/173_print.html --ed.]

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