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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).
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