Third trial in Rambus/Hynix case postponed till at least Feb. 07

In another installment in the Rambus/Hynix case, Judge Ronald Whyte said the third trial in the case will begin no sooner than February 2007.

This case presents issues of patenting industry standards, as came up, for example, in the Unocal case on gasoline.

The FTC ruled on August 2, 2006 that Rambus engaged in deceptive conduct. The issue is that Rambus attended meetings of a memory chip standards panel without disclosing its patent interests.

In a different vein, recall that Science published the two papers of Hwang Woo Suk et al. without disclosing that Hwang and Schatten had patent interests in the stem cell work being presented in the papers.