Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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).
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.
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.
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.