Hynix claim Rambus set patent trap

From SiliconValley News:

"Rambus ensnared memory chip manufacturers in a "patent trap" in its attempt to "control the industry," a lawyer for Hynix Semiconductor told a jury in San Jose on Monday.

William Price, representing Hynix, the world's second-largest maker of memory chips, told jurors that in the 1990s Rambus participated in standards-setting meetings of the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council and then secretly and illegally used JEDEC information to patent standards for dynamic random access memory, or DRAM.

Rambus gathered information from JEDEC as the chip makers spent millions adopting the standard and building plants to manufacture the chips, Price said. "At that point Rambus would come forward and say, 'Aha! We own the technology on that standard,' " he told jurors. "That activity is called a patent trap."

Hynix made its opening arguments in the final trial of the seven-year patent infringement lawsuit."