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Cisco Sued over OFDM Wireless Standards
Agent Green writes "It's definitely not the first time someone has been sued over a standard, but Wi-LAN is in the process of taking Cisco to court over the OFDM encoding which it claims to have patents for - the standards in question apply to 802.11a/g. Interestingly, this case is being brought in Canada, where the defense needs to prove its case. Might be time to join and expand the patent busting brigade?"
Patents just cause trouble. See? See?
sigaar
Who cares that it may have cost millions of dollars of risk and investment to devise, refine and perfect OFDM and the related technologies
By the way, I know that it took you years of hard work to earn a salary to pay off your mortgage, but I actually think your house would make for a good party zone, so me and the boys will be around next Saturday night.
> Who cares that it may have cost millions of
a l. pdf
> dollars of risk and investment to devise, refine
> and perfect OFDM and the related technologies
Yeah, right.
The concept of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing is old. Way old. Like, 1960s old. The mathematics behind it could easily be grasped by anyone who knows what a sine wave is. These people certainly didn't devise it. And they admit it, for example in this white-paper:
www.wi-lan.com/library/whitepaper_wofdm_technic
If you look at what they're *actually* claiming to own, this W-OFDM technology is really just a bunch of pre-existing technologies - modulation scheme, channel coding, FFTs, embedded pilot channels - which they've lumped together, given a name and patented. If you look at their block diagrams, you'll see little more than an undergraduate textbook on modern communications systems design would show you.
> we just want them to be free for all of us to use,
> so we definitely should bust their patents.
No... we just want unfettered competition to bring us the benefits of the free market, without being bogged down by people claiming to have "invented" things that aren't actually novel in any way.
These sigs are more interesting tha
This is all patent nonsense.
Why is it possible to sue a company which makes use of an official standardised specification like 802.11g? If something is an open standard, everybody is free to use it, unless some royalty conditions are specifically included, right? If any company has a patent on any part of a technology, it is usually a proprietary solution and not an official specification, right? So, wouldn't you need to sue the committee that approved this specific technology as standard, rather than the individuals using the standard?
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
FYI here is the patent which covers that work. My name is not on it. At the time, it was the concept of a wireless version of Ethernet that was seen to be novel. Others had low speed networks (packet radio). High speed wireless point-to-point links also existed. As far as we knew, noone had yet tried to build something that was a network AND high speed.
Anyway, that was my understanding at the time. As is usual, most parties were playing their cards close to their chest, so there could have been others. The only other one I knew of at the time was the Bereley InfoPad. I'll be as interested as anyone else to see of the patent survives the challenge.
I don't like the current patent mess, but the Cisco patent at least was real in that itwas not speculative. There was a serious R&D effort behind it (as shown by the fact that product was produced).
Interestingly, this case is being brought in Canada, where the defense needs to prove its case.
Population of Canada: 35 million
Population of the United States: 293 million
Population of Europian Union: 380 million
So, assuming that Cisco had to stop selling in Canada and instead sold in just the United States and Europe (ignoring Asia, Australia, etc., entirely), their sales would decrease by less than 5% (35/708). Wouldn't it be reasonable for them to just ignore this lawsuit, and in the meantime continue selling in Canada? If the government eventually forces them to stop, it'd really be no particularly big loss, except to Canada--who would no longer have access to Cisco technology. Which would therefore make the government unlikely to stop Cisco from selling there. Seems like Cisco holds all the cards, here.
a good wap upside the head.
One small step for the patent holder.
Two steps back for man kind.......
So much for foresight.
Havin' it large, livin' the life, Welcome to the land of the rising sun.
Wi-LAN is the SCO of the Wireless world and they have tried this before. I was part of a large roll out of their equipment several years ago, there stuff isn't very good but their major problem is that 802.11 has taken their old proprietary market away. I remember too clearly how arrogant they were that 802.11 wasn't a threat and that it would "never interoperate across vendors".
What do you do when you can't adapt, why, you sue the people that can adapt and make the best wireless products. SCO of wireless.
There are entirely too many IP shell companies out there that do nothing but threaten and harass useful companies without providing commercial products based on the patents themselves. They have no plans to exploit their manufacturing monopoly in any honest way. Instead, they should be required in some form to manufacturer real products utilizing their IP or risk losing enforeability in some way. That may require them to cross-license needed IP as well as seriously limit this entire anti-social/economic lawyer business. It could be possible that plaintifs in patent cases must first prove their manufacturing intent to some law/court derived set of requirements before action is started.
The Gross Domestic Product of a country is hardly an accurate measure of the market for a product in that country...
If these guys win in Canada, it won't affect the US products, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. Cisco will still be able to sell products in the US even if Wi-Lan wins.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
its clever if you know what wap means.
Although I can see how someone might think the parent post was a troll, it does present a somewhat reasonable strategy, from a game theory point of view, for Cisco ... basically a Grim Trigger strategy. Cisco threatens the Canadian government that they'll pull out of their market entirely if they don't cooperate with them. Cisco doesn't have much to lose, but Canada has a LOT to lose.
All your Cisco tech are belong to OFDM
She is C. I. S. C. O.,
We spent the night in Cisco,
At every kind of disco...
Thank you very much.
Uhh oh, looking around my house, what doesn't use this standard in some way? OFDM or varitations like COFDM are used in counless things, the DVB-T digital TV standard, 3G phones (W-CDMA), ADSL, DAB digital radio, DRM digital radio, DECT cordless phones, HomePlug adapters, HomePNA and various other bespoke standard I can't recall.
OFDM was actually invented by the US military as a set up from frequency hopping, in the 80's the France Telecom research labs spent a lot of time developing it into COFDM.
I was found innocent of weapons smuggling BTW.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
...assumed this was a story about a law firm demonstrating the ability to deliver writs over the airwaves by encoding them to the OFDM Wireless Standards?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I don't know much about the Canadian legal system, but I know that Canada is a member of the British Commonwealth, and as such its legal system is based on the British one.
This means that, unless they have specifically enacted a change in the laws on burden of proof, the decision in a civil case like this one ought to be based on balance of evidence; that is, whichever side is most likely to be in the right should win. Nobody needs to prove anything.
Anyone with knowledge of Canadian law want to confirm or deny this?
On some logical level this argument makes sense, but in realitiy do you really think the shareholders would stand by while the CEO purposely pisses away 5% of the sales?
5% doesn't sound like much, but to a company the size of cisco it could end up costing large shareholders millions of $$. And as much as we'd like to think that certain companies 'are on our side', in reality these corporations exist to please the shareholders.
And as far as Canada being the loser, well, cisco isn't the only game in town.
In the article in CNET there is the following quote:
"Without our OFDM patents, there would be no
802.11a/g," he said. "We didn't enforce these
patents sooner, because we didn't want to slow
down development in the market. But now that
the technologies are firmly established, we
feel we must protect our intellectual
property."
Since they did not start enforcing their patents when they first discovered the "infringement" they should not be allowed to enforce them now.
Don't forget NAFTA. Any court decisions in Canada could well affect the United States because of the provisions in NAFTA. The patent systems in the 2 countries are tied very closely together now.
I recently consulted a Canadian copyright lawyer on some matters of U.S. copyright. It turns out that Canada and many states have reciprocal agreements. That means that a case won in Canada CAN be enforced easily in the U.S. And vice versa. It also means you could litigate someplace remote like Hawaii (if they have a reciprocal agreement) and get it enforced in Newfoundland.
Life Insurance in Canada
You might have got away with it in Canada, however you're probably on GWB's watch list now !!
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
I was always under the impression that the first practical implementation of OFDM was in ADSL modulation. It also provided the first generation of adaptive channel optimisations for OFDM.
who grants these patents, I wonder if they'd grant a patent the Forier or Lapalce transform... That would make a mess of things!!
What would Canada really be losing if it couldn't buy Cisco technology? Canadians can just as easily buy a switch or router from Juniper, Nortel, or D-Link (instead of Linksys, which Cisco bought). Do you forget (or neglect, or not know) that Nortel is a *Canadian* company and a leader in optical, wireless, and VoIP technology? And Wi-LAN was a leader in OFDM networking long before wireless LANs became so popular.
The whole patent thing sounds fishy, but FYI Wi-Lan is a respected radio vendor. I've deployed about a dozen links using the AWE-120 5.8 GHz bridges and its the sort of equipment that you need to write down the passwords for because you'll almost never have to log in and mess with it once its running.
...
They build a competent ten mbit link radio, they've played with some weird 2.4 stuff, but mostly they strike me as a radio company trying to do some data. They've struggled to come out with a product that competes with Redline's fine OFDM products. Perhaps suing Cisco is a ploy as part of acquisition negotiations by Redline, Alvarion, etc
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Because that Canadian company Nortel certainly doesn't make routers and other networking equipment, whatever would Canada do?
Yes!
Wi-Lan has been fighting Cisco on OFDM patents for years, including some of the fixed wireless stuff we were working on in the late 90s. Their patents are incredibly weak and flawed. Cisco should prevail, though stranger things have happened, so it wouldn't completely surprise me if they settled somehow. I'm sure Wi-Lan would love that.
The company claims "Without our OFDM patents, there would be no 802.11a/g," he said. "We didn't enforce these patents sooner, because we didn't want to slow down development in the market. But now that the technologies are firmly established, we feel we must protect our intellectual property."
s +l awsuit/2100-7351_3-5245505.html?tag=nefd.top
http://news.com.com/Cisco+the+target+of+wireles
stats aren't as meaningful unless you look at all of them. for instance, if you are trying to see which area is "more valuable", there's no way in heck you could compare canada with california, canada trounces them in many other ways, despite having a lower GDP/GSP. You also need to look at Cost of Living, I would imagine it's higher in california, therefore diluting the importance of an inflationary and artificially increased money supply. In fact, I would maintain that having it this way tends to seriously undermine wealth in other areas when there is such a discrepency, as it would help put into place an artifically higher price for a variety of goods and services across the board, as people would get an illusion that those numbers can and should be transferrred else where. This is why when we have our laws and opricing structures dictated by three primarily expensive places in the US, which are washington DC, NYC and LA, because that's where most of the cultural input that is "official" comes from,right into laws and the media brainwashing-err I mean "news"- they gradually lose touch with the rest of the nation, and it gets worse the longer it continues. If it costs you more to get the same thing-the higher cost of living area is actually worse off, because they have an inflated money supply. They have to struggle to maintain a median living arrangement with totally skewed costs. Whenh it can't be sustained, you will get events such as rapid outsourcing out of the area, further putting a strain on the remainder of the citizens/businesses to maintain the PREVIOUS higher levels of pay so that inflated costs may be maintained, and it can't be done forever. It will lead to unnatrual boom and bust cycles, rasther than a steady and sane growth based on over-all productivity. For instance, I have seen homes in california the last time I visited that were-geez, hard to tell-selling for around 5 times higher than an identical home here in georgia at the time. It's not because the materials were that much higher, just that the wages and costs were expanded to way past any other sort of normality anyplace else, and it's unsustainable in the long run. That's one of the reasons you are seeing california in serious money troubles now. They have an artifically higher cost of living compared to most other areas of the nation, and I would imagine it's in a similar situation compared with canada in general.
What that will have to do with ciscos market I think will be more a function of how well their products do every place else. If the lower COL areas are able to keep buying them regardeless, then not much. If the tip over point into "too expensive" is reached, then cisco will be forced to make all it's money only in the most extremely inflated and expensive markets, which isn't a good move in the long run unless all you want to be is an extreme niche player. Some companies can do this, other's can't. Given that routers are needed almost everyplace, it would seem to be prudent for cisco to stay reasonable in pricing so they can sell all over. If routers were only needed in california alone, then they could jack it up and ignore the rest of the world. and once it gets into international patent squabbles, I give up, it's so nuts I won't pretend to understand it other than "it's a broken system".
And just a side note before anyone says that this is how markets work, I'll say, not exactly. Actual true honest markets would not be using a money/trading supply scheme like we have now that artifically props up favorite pet industries and companies of the central bankers and their drinking and golf buddies. Our M3 supply is highly artificial, it is not in any way based on verifiable produced wealth by people actually working and producing goods, ie, creating wealth, it is poof created out of thin air and consistently goes to support those favorite pet companies of the elite connected ones in areas like LA, DC, and NYC if you follow it around enough, so you get a COL schism that leads to unreasonable expectations and a series
Long live patents! I mean, er... uh... What am I supposed to do, again?
I think they are just bringing the lawsuit to them. Wi-Lan's head office is in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. They are a large company, but if you look at the latest financials on their website, they are no Cisco. This may be a David and Goliath fight, and why not fight in on home turf? Plus, it would probably be significantly less expensive.
Whats your Favorite song or artist? YourFavMusi
...brought in Canada, where the defense needs to prove its case...
I thought a common precept in jurisprudence was that a person is considered innocent until proven guilty.
Is it true, then, that your are considered guilty until proven innocent in Canada? This boggles the mind...
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Nortel doesn't make routers? Try again. Around four years ago, when Nortel acquired Bay Networks, it gained a substantial switch and router product line.
In a "functional world" patents would only be sought by individuals when effort had been expended and they would only be granted when a learned individual said "damn straight, great idea."
With the advent of the idea patent, or more precisely with the demise of the "working model requirement" we lost the "effort" hoop.
With the natural tendency to fire people for saying "I don't know (this topic), we need to ask someone who does" from the patent office (or, sadly, most jobs) we lost the "learned individual" hoop.
With the fee structure we lost the "individual".
And now, patents are bad. Pretty much "period". And they are bad because of the "presumption" that the patent holder has *already* been vetted by those effort and learned hoops.
How would *I* fix the patent system? Hmmm...
-- Only individuals may hold a patent, not corporations nor organizations.
-- Patents may be "licenced" from that individual but only for a statutatorally (sp?) large fee ($70,000 a year).
-- Patent holders may "ceede a license" to a standard, standards organization, or public entity etc, but only "for free." and only if the holder, at the time of the grant, had no other financial (etc) connection to that organization. That patent can then and irrevocably and forever be used in connection with that standard.
-- Patent exhamination would be by-contest. The paid evaluators would sit on a jurry of sorts, and the examiners would be paid bounties, awareded by that jury and paid by the patent applicant, for each element of the patent they successfully submarene. There would be a schedule. You know, $1,000 for each vague claim, $5,000 for each non-intersecting example of prior art, that sort of thing.
(Ok, so those aren't really all that practical, but I think you get my drift.)
In short, it should cost *more* and by *a lot*, to "fail to get" a patent then to have one "awarded" and the examiners should be incentivized (sic) to (honestly) fail them.
When you buy a patent (and you *do* buy them) you are effectively buying the near-certian favorable outcome of all the conflicts and court cases that may arrise regarding a topic.
That should be expensive to get, and *DAMN* *EXPENSIVE* to ask for if you don't deserve it clearly and beyond question.
Remember, a Patent is like an Indulgence. You are buying victory now on the supposition that Sin will Follow.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Sorry, you can't use my house for a party. You can't use your house, or any friends house. I have patented "having a party at a house" and will sue you for infringement if you dare try!