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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?"
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).
The Gross Domestic Product of a country is hardly an accurate measure of the market for a product in that country...
Copyrights would be more of a "take your house and use it as my own" deal, yes?
.if you have a really great and original idea, it also seems like you ought to be able to make money off of it without a bunch of copycats stomping you out of business. At least for an appropriate period of time, at least.
Well no, not really. That would be plagiarizing. Taking an idea and claiming it as your own.
. .
Given that the idea is a thing and not just an idea, like one click shopping, sure. Jefferson pretty much got it right right off the bat. He felt that patents and copyrights were wrong, and he may have been right, but putting him in charge of implimentation was the perfect thing to do, because being the sort of egalitarian thinker he was he was able to draft a nearly perfect compromise between freedom of the people and protection for the individual.
He even forsaw that it was going to be corporations that caused all the trouble, not intellectual property itself.
What also made him apropo for the role is that he wasn't an "outsider", he was a prolific inventor himself.
"Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight." - Thomas Jefferson
He allowed free use of his inventions, considering them having been made for the betterment of mankind.
When Benjamin Franklin was informed that someone in England was making copies of his stoves he declared that since he had invented them to improve the lot of the average human the copier was simply doing his work for him.
The patent on the cotten gin was the last patent that Eli Whitney ever filed, although he went on to many other inventions, declaring that some inventions are too valuable to be owned.
I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with inventors making money, I'm an inventor myself, but we have to be very careful about defining "invention" and "appropriate" period of time.
Even if it "costs" me money. I recognize that I'm not the only person in the universe, nor the only person with rights.
KFG
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?
One of the flaws inherent in patenting, as opposed to copyright, is that you can violate a patent even if you didn't copy it.
You're not a songwriter, are you? We live in daily mortal terror of that very thing.
And it is the very crux of my "build your own house" example.
KFG
The only time this is slightly different is under Canada's new (and highly controversial) anti-terrorism laws, which allow police to hold people without charges (much like the new American laws -- PATRIOT act?). This act is falling apart at the seams, as the courts have recently decided that another part of it (secret court hearings) is illegal.
Hi all,
;-)
In general, and especially when it comes to software patents and so-called business model patents, I'm on the side of busting 'em up. I've seen far too many far too obvious software patents in my work over the past 10 years.
However, I have to come down on the side of Wi-LAN for this one. Like the previous poster, I too am an EE (Comp. E, and Ph.D. EE). But unlike him I have extensive background in this particular matter because as VP of Engineering for Wi-LAN in the late 90's I did a lot of the hands on work making the technology work, wrote ancillary patent applications, and in so doing went through all the history of the technology. The key, novel claim for W-OFDM is the idea of employing OFDM in a wideband signal. This combats fading because each of the sub-carriers effectively experiences flat fading. Prior to that idea (which the authors of the patents had in 1990 or so), OFDM was used in narrowband (relatively speaking) systems and had it's share of problems.
"Just pick up any book on RF coms. This is basic stuff for anyone experienced in the field. "
People are right in that it's now standard textbook stuff. But before 1999, I don't think it was mentioned in any undergrad textbooks, at least none that I'm aware of. The best reference was Cimini's paper (but I digress...).
Other claims/ideas from Wi-LAN related to OFDM pertained mostly to making the technology practical to implement. In the early 90s, there was really no way to economically build an OFDM-based modem for commercial/consumer applications. I used a simple measure of dollars/bit/s/Hz to illustrate the relative costs of DSSS vs OFDM. About 1996 or 1997, fabrication processes made OFDM cost competitive. Part of what the founders of Wi-LAN did was to anticipate what would be needed for a commercial OFDM system and build a company to do the research required to be ready for the arrival of cost-effective technology to realize the modem.
Anyway, you get the point.
Last, and perhaps most important. I sat on the TGa and TGb subgroups in the IEEE 802.11 standards meetings and helped to define the standard. As anyone who has helped in IEEE standards definition work knows, the task groups are required to get signed letters from the holders of any IP related to the standard being worked on saying (I paraphrase) that the IP holder promises to license their technology in a reasonable fashion, at a fair rate, and without bias to all parties. Thus, this lawsuit is all about testing the veracity of Wi-LAN's claims, not about grabbing something that people haven't already agreed might be due to them. If they are right, they stand to get a very small percentage of the cost of a chip set in licensing fees (in the semi business, this is always much less than 5%; a "fair" rate). If they are wrong, they are out of luck wrt all that initial investment and long hours of work.
There is one other point for people to ponder... A common thing for the big companies like Cisco to do is to buy smaller companies. Radiata, the original company that Wi-LAN sued, was bought by Cisco and, hence, their involvement. Why do big companies buy little ones? To get the IP. If you read an article in a recent MIT Tech Review on why big companies can't do R&D, you'll find the author's argument that the VC business model is to blame. He argues that VC fund small, really talented groups of people to invent new things with the promise that the founders will get rich. It works pretty well, well enough that many of the best people don't join big labs like they used to in the 60s and 70s, but prefer to assume the risk of a start up. Thus, to get the "research" large companies are compelled to buy startups. From the VC perspective, everyone wins...
Amusingly, I remember being at an IEEE 802.11 meeting in San Antonio and eavesdropping on a senior Cisco wireless engineer talking about how Cisco valued companies for acquisition (this is in 1999). He basically said that they paid L, M, or N millions for each engineer, executive, and technician. Times were good back then