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?"

Comments

Re:exactly!

[kfg]

I actually think your house would make for a good party zone, so me and the boys will be around next Saturday night.

No thank you, but if you'd like to build yourself a house just like it I'd have no particular objections.

KFG

Not exactly.

[CaptainAlbert]

> Who cares that it may have cost millions of
> 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_technica l. pdf

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.

Re:Not exactly.

[curator_thew]

``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.``

Nice try, but you're committing the classic mistake: retrospectively assessing an invention. Many inventions look deceptively simple and obvious in hindsight. In fact, it's often the hallmark of a brilliant invention that it's so simple.

Do you think that it was obvious to combine all of those elements in that particular way? Do you think that it required no undue experimentation to perfect the system and reduce it to a workable technology ?

I mean, using your argument, we could say that the transistor was obvious, because it's just a bunch of pre-existing concepts put together.

``without being bogged down by people claiming to have "invented" things that aren't actually novel in any way.``

And equally, being bogged down by people claiming that the invention was obvious, so they can use it themselves to rip off the hard work and cost of the inventor.

Basically, put your money where your mouth is and put more effort into proving that the invention wasn't inventive and non-obvious given the state of the art in 1993.

Re:Not exactly.

[bit01]

Nice try, but you're committing the classic mistake: retrospectively assessing an invention. Many inventions look deceptively simple and obvious in hindsight. In fact, it's often the hallmark of a brilliant invention that it's so simple.

A pretty sounding but faulty argument that patent supporters like to use. Retrospective assessment, by definition, will have more facts available to make a judgment and therefore will be a better judgement.True innovation is obvious both pre- and post- innovation.

Often, so-called innovation is merely an idea whose time has come that will be invented independently in a short period of time by many people with no so-called "prior art". None. The the patent office gives a monopoly to one "inventor", sometimes giving them a multi-million dollar advantage, and penalises many others who've done exactly the same thing. Yet another example of how unfair the patent system is.

If the patent system truly reflected the reality of IP invention rather than some lawyer fiction at a minimum it would allow multiple near simultaneous invention. It would also not make "prior art" the definition of innovation but "obvious to an expert in the field" (not some patent office non-inventor) instead. In addition it would also assume that simultaneous inventors are innocent of copying until proven guilty with a chain of evidence, like most law.

---

It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.

Re:Sue a Standard?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how it works. A standard is just a way of saying how you should do something, not a permission to do it that way. The standards committee is not implementing its own standard, so it can't be sued as such. The question is: Did the standards committee do a good job if an implementation of the standard requires patented technology? That depends on your point of view, I guess...

SCO of Wireless

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Patent reform should also restrict enforcement

[clusterix]

In addition to limiting what can be patented and better analysis before granting, there must be some economic morale requirements for enforcement.

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.

Re:Patent reform should also restrict enforcement

[Halo1]

The only reason they are able to do that, is that the big companies like IBM, Sun etc pushed the patent system further and further into the state it is in now... They loved the fact to be able to get really broad and generic patents (often even with little or no investment), but forgot that this could also be used against them. Now they are whining about so-called patent trolls...

Re:Patent reform should also restrict enforcement

[kfg]

While your idea has merit on its face, one of the results would be to force the small, shed in the yard inventor, and yes, they still exist, into the manufacturing business, which might well prove economically impossible, or, force them into being the sort of corporate holder of patents that is causing so much of the trouble.

Beyond repairing the patent granting system the ultimate solution is to eliminate patents on ideas, and to require that one working model can at least be demonstrated.

I don't know why someone didn't think of this system before.

KFG

Re:exactly!

[femto]

I happen to know a little about the current situation as I used to work for the inventors of Cisco's technology.

It's interesting to note that when Cisco bought Radiata (the company that developed their OFDM technology), they *didn't* buy Radiata because of their patent! This was told to me by one of the most senior guys in the company.

Radiata's patent covered the baseband digital systems. Cisco bought the company because of the 5GHz radio chip the company had developed.

This radio chip was ahead of anything else available at the time. It was *NOT* patented. The barrier to entry was the high level of R&D and expertise required to reproduce the chip, not a patent.

Whatever the merits of the patent system, OFDM WLAN is not an invention that was a result of the patent system. Rather it was driven by the vision of the inventors, their desire to make great things (and a pile of money) and their desire to stay ahead of the competition.

In this case, the money and rewards followed from being ahead of the competition, not from owning a patent.

Re:exactly!

[squiggleslash]

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. That is, if you independently come up with the same idea, you are still in violation of the pre-existing patent.

I thought that worth mentioning as that's another argument against patents that's frequently forgotten and is, to be, the crux of what makes patents, as opposed to copyrights, unjust, though it's not so relevent for this particular example.

They Should Not Be Allowed To Inforce This

[jmorey]

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.

Re:Cisco's Patent

[Bazzargh]

"At the time, it was the concept of a wireless version of Ethernet that was seen to be novel."

the funny part of this is, that Bob Metcalfe based the design of wired Ethernet on the wireless Aloha-net. I seem to remember an interview where he said they originally moved to cable because they couldn't afford the radio links that U. Hawaii had used.

(yeah I know this is what you're referring to as packet radio - I just happen to be easily amused)

Ok as a serious argument though, this comment from one of the Ethernet pioneers is interesting:

"David Liddle, now general partner at U.S. Venture Partners, said Xerox charged a one-time license fee of just $1,000. That's in contrast to the huge fees associated with Token Ring.

Xerox's stipulation was that the technology couldn't be changed -- it had to interoperate with all other Ethernet implementations. "Thus we made a playing field in which we could all thrive and compete," Liddle said"

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id =3 4327

Its interesting because its today's argument happening 20 years ago - IBM attempting to turn a token-ring into a cash cow (like today's patent shills) turned people away from it as a standard, and Ethernet won - admittedly with a 'RAND' approach, not a patent-free approach.