Man gets rack of cash for inventing flash

FUIJO MASUOKA was awarded ¥87 million ($749,225) by a Tokyo court with Toshiba picking up the tab.

The Nihon Keizai Shimbun said that while Masuoka had wanted ¥1.1 billion for inventing flash memory, the award is nevertheless the third biggest ever awarded in employee patent cases.

Masuoka, who is now a professor at Tohoku University, had clocked up an astonishing 500 patents when he worked at Toshiba. Toshiba paid six million yen to him while he was working there to transfer the patents.

The flash patents represent a mere 41 out of the 500 he transferred. µ

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