14 DAY TRIAL // It's never fun to battle someone else in court, but tech companies, all companies really, do it with a frightful regularity. In this case, Toshiba has started a fight with SK Hynix.
To elaborate, Toshiba Corporation has announced that a civil suit has been started against Korea's SK Hynix Inc.
In a nutshell, Toshiba is accusing the defendant of having illegally acquired and used “proprietary technical information related to NAND flash memory.”
Seeing as how Toshiba has been one of the prime providers and inventors of NAND Flash products since 1987, it is quite cross at having had its IP misappropriated. Allegedly.
It's all rather tragic really, since SK Hynix is a business partner of Toshiba, if not on the NAND Flash market.
Oh well, at this point, there's always room for another litigation. One always crops up every month anyway.
For those who want details, Toshiba filed the suit after it heard about a former SK Hynix employee being arrested in Japan for alleged criminal infringement of the Unfair Competition Prevention Act.
The employee used to work for SanDisk on a NAND memory development project, which Toshiba was involved in. That, Toshiba thinks, is where SK Hynix got its hands on its IP.