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U.S. Firms Take on Australia's CSIRO Over Patents
dingram17 writes "ABC News is reporting that six U.S. computer companies (Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Microsoft and Netgear) are taking legal action to try to break a U.S. patent that the CSIRO holds on wireless networking.
The CSIRO has patents on OFDM technology, as used in 802.11a and 802.11g. It has been alleged that the CSIRO demands $4 per chipset for the use of this technology. It appears that the patent in question is U.S. Patent 5,487,069 'Wireless LAN.' From a quick look, this appears to be a wide ranging patent."
First, let me start by saying that the patent system is pretty stupid. However, its pretty hypocrit of US companies to fight a patent that does not fit them. These companies would not even think for a minute to sue someone else over a patent they own. But when someone uses it against them then they cry foul.
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
Simply stunning. So a company actually holds a legal patent to a technology they invented and since the big boys (Dell, Apple, etc) don't want to pay the royalties they try to legally "break" the patent. Does anyone else see something wrong with this? I hardly see these companies as the victim.
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
Kind-of a catch-all government sponsored department for scientific research.
See http://www.csiro.au/
I hope the CSIRO wins considereing the way we get stuffed over by US companies out here.
Remember, people: Patents are only good when they put money in YOUR pocket.
After all the patents U.S. companies have been taking out for this exact purpose, I say, let the Aussies bash 'em once!
At any rate, I've given up hope that the patent system will actually be fixed...
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
So it seems that if you have lots of money and you find a patent held by someone that infringes on your ability to rape for money, you just take them to court to null the patent.
The companies listed I am sure all have patents that are just as far reaching or broad,(didn't sony just apply for a patent for a method of transfering information directly to your brain), which I am sure could be contested in the same way.
I guess the only difference is that Joe Nobody doesn't have the cash or the political/economic connections that these companies have.
if they win, what will the precidence be for the rest of us as to the legality or coverage of US patents? Could this be the loophole many have been looking for to get all those wide reaching, stupid patents we all hate and read about, dismissed?
Feed my eyes...
Why won't these companies make up their minds? Do they like protecting IP with patents or not? It looks as though the only important IP is their IP.
Microsoft has been using patents for years to squash oposition, now they are sick and tired of $4 per chip? That must be breaking their bank!
From a previous slashdot article, http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/14/07 2201&tid=109&tid=141&tid=155&tid=1
How hypocritical are Microsoft appearing?
On one hand they're trying to teach kids flawed views on intellectual property to ensure that future generations won't pirate as much, and on the other hand they're doing exactly what they're trying to prevent, the theft of intellectual property.
Such sad, sad, little people.
CSIRO is an applied science research organisation where part of the money is provided by the Australian government, and part of the money is provided by business.
There is a strong focus on making practical discoveries for use in industry.
If the US would then similarly like to not honour Australian patents, they're welcome -- given that's what they appear to want anyway.
If the companies in question want to reap the benefits of the patent system, they have to pay the price of the patent system. But since most three-year-old children show greater maturity than most of these corporations, it's no surprise that these corporations want to reap the benefits without paying the price.
They're just lucky that the organization in question (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, a research arm of the Australian government) isn't a competitor. Although I suppose in this case it could use this patent to give Australian companies an advantage over their American competition.
It's about damned time the U.S. corporations got a black eye from the bullshit patent situation over here. After all, they're the ones who have been abusing it. I just wish it happened far more often.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I think that there should be a blanket patent exemption for pure research, though I'm not quite sure how one should define the exemption.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I read this and couldn't help but laugh out loud.
6 very large, very well backed AMERICAN companies, are going to take an AUSTRALIAN government backed RESEARCH ORGANISATION in an IP battle.
Right after the free trade agreement was struck, that is meant to bring our IP laws into line with the US?
I hope CSIRO doesn't back down. Stick it to the companies. The same companies that would use those laws to screw anyone else, who infringes on their IP.
C'mon AUSSIE C'mon!
Any government funded organization that is built in to a mountain protected by a gaping chasm is not going to worry to much about anything.
Our scientists thought it up we should keep the $4 per chip not like they can't charge an extra $4 for a notebook computer
This Patent is not broad as in "vague and meaningless" - rather, it contains many specific claims, and thus only affects certain technologies.
....
The "Background of the Invention" section is written in plain English instead of Patentese, and includes the following:
(If it sounds dated, well, the application was filed on the 23rd of November, 1993)
"Accordingly, the need arises for a LAN to which such portable devices can be connected by means of a wireless or radio link.
Such wireless LANs are known, however, hitherto they have been substantially restricted to low data transmission rates. In order to achieve widespread commercial acceptability, it is necessary to have a relatively high transmission rate and therefore transmit on a relatively high frequency, of the order of 1 GHz or higher. As will be explained hereafter, radio transmission at such high frequencies encounters a collection of unique problems.
One wireless LAN which is commercially available is that sold by Motorola under the trade name ALTAIR. This system operates at approximately 18 GHz, however, the maximum data transmission rate is limited to approximately 3-6 Mbit/s. A useful review of this system and the problems of wireless reception at these frequencies and in "office" environments is contained in "Radio Propagation and Anti-multipath Techniques in the WIN Environment", James E. Mitzlaff IEEE Network Magazine November 1991 pp. 21-26.
This engineering designer concludes that the inadequate performance, and the large size, expense and power consumption of the hardware needed to adaptively equalize even a 10 Mbit/s data signal are such that the problems of multipath propagation cannot thereby be overcome in Wireless In-Building Network (WIN) systems. Similarly, spread spectrum techniques which might also be used to combat multipath problems consume too much bandwidth (300 MHz for 10 Mbits/s) to be effective. A data rate of 100 Mbit/s utilizing this technology would therefore consume 3 GHz of bandwidth.
Instead, the solution adopted by Motorola and Mitzlaff is a directional antenna system with 6 beams for each antenna resulting in 36 possible transmission paths to be periodically checked by the system processor in order to locate the "best quality" path and "switch" the antennae accordingly. This procedure adds substantial bulk and cost to the system. This procedure is essentially the conversion of a multipath transmission problem into a single path transmission environment by the use of directional antennae.
OBJECTS AND SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The object of the present invention is to provide a wireless LAN in a confined multipath transmission environment having a high bit rate even through the reciprocal of the data or information bit rate (the data "period") is short relative to the time delay differences between significant transmission paths.
Preferably, transmission is enhanced by the use of one or more of the following techniques, namely interactive channel sounding, forward error correction with redundancy sufficient for non-interactive correction, modulation with redundancy sufficient for interactive error correction by re-transmission of at least selected data, and the choice of allocation of data between sub-channels.
The radio transmission is also preferably divided into small packets of data each of which is transmitted over a time period in which the transmission characteristics over the predetermined range are relatively constant.
The encoding of the data is preferably carried out on an ensemble of carriers each costituting a sub-channel and having a different frequency with the modulation of each individual carrier preferably being multi-level modulation of carrier amplitude and/or phase (mQAM).
if I had such a patent in my pocket, I'd licence it out on terms that said I could renegotiate any licence if and when my "client" decided to sue me for anything whatsoever.
In other words, you can licence it from me for $4 per unit sold. Complain about the patent; if you lose, it becomes $8 per unit. Complain about anything else, and it becomes $12 per unit. Still want to complain, or am I now your newest bestest buddy...?
Almost seems like common sense, which IP law in general is lacking across the board.
CSIRO is a not-for-profit Australian Government organisation. Do all these companies really want to screw around with what is likely to be their biggest customer in Australia ?
Invalidate the patent by all means if it shouldn't have been granted. However, if it is legitimate, then just pay the licensing fees.
Remember, a patent is a government granted monopoly for a time period to allow the patent holder to both recoup their costs and to make a profit out of inventing the idea that has been patented. If these companies don't like that, then they should have all their patents revoked immediately, or they should sue the US government for incopetence because the US government granted the patent in the first place.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Is that to some extent CSIRO seem to be using the patent system for what it was designed for. They have 'invented' something and are now trying to licence it to make money directly from that invention.
To me this seems purer than a company patenting something and then using that patent as a means to create an artificial monopoly and lock out competitors.
$4 does sound like quite a lot per unit but I wonder if they can do that because they are only on one end of the patent equation.
I'm sure MS, IBM etc would like to charge obscene amounts for a patent they own too but as they are on both the selling and buying end of such deals they maybe cautious about inflating the accepted price of patent licencing?
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Negotiations with CSIRO have come to a halt, and US troops are readying a full invas^H^H^H^H^H liberation attack on Australia.
It has been discovered that the CSIRO technology could potentially assist enemies of the free world.
The first stage of the attack, dubbed operation "Patent Freedom", could commence as soon as next week.
I don't mind not having a government grant. I can get commercial funding. What I do object to is the govenment pumping money into the CSIRO when all they can produce for their efforts is a 2x2 static MIMO demo when we can produce a fully working 4x4 MIMO transmitter and receiver, and then going on about how brilliant their research is.
You see, the problem is, the CSIRO is fat on government grants, so they don't have to work hard to survive. The rest of us have to fight for commercial funding by doing great research and making stuff that works and is truly ready for commercialisation.
My previous post was a bit of a troll. The CSIRO does do some great work, it's just that most of it isn't in my area.
The thing about stealing ideas is a bit personal. Their wideband channel sounder is pretty much a carbon copy of something they saw on a tour of our institution. We were talking about our ideas, and they were saying that their approach was so much better, then next month they've got something that's a copy of ours.
If patents have some uses it should be used to prevent wholesale copying of complete designs, which is as impossible to accidentally reinvent as it is to write a novel only to find that someone has already written essentially the same thing. The broad patents are better struck down, and I oppose anyone who wants to use them offensively, whether it is big-company-to-small-company, small-company-to-big-company, or government-entity-to-big-company.
In further news, George W Bush declared war on technologists today, stating that 'for to long have we stood by and done nothing while Australians developed interesting telecommunications networks' and also that 'the whole point of this free trade agreement was to stick it to them, not have them stick it to us. John Howard promised me that wouldn't happen. He promised!'
Dick Cheney, while stroking his missile launch codes briefcase, refused to comment. Rumsfeld barked like a dog.
Yay me!
Sorry, we didn't grow up in a culture that says everyone has the right to bear heavy calibre machine guns.
On the snide remark regarding australias armed forces, lets just remember that in the latest american adventure, it was australian special forces doing a lot of the ground work before the invasion even started. You guys couldn't even stop the looters from robbing the local banks
Here in New Zealand, the US tried to get NZ to overturn it's "no nuclear" policy, and as a "reward", we would have a free trade agreement with the US (the US wants to park it's nuclear powered submarines in our waters). The US got a polite "fuck off". Pretty much every economist and politician here seems to agree that a FTA with the states is a very bad idea.
I think the reason why people became "pro-patent in this case" is that the CSIRO actually use patents the way they were intended to be used. They invent something, then re-invest the money back into current research. They have been quietly doing this under various names since 1916 and have a very impressive record of practical innovation and basic research.
"...the ideas there such as OFDM and FEC, etc. are actually not all that ingenious." - CSIRO developed and patented the idea a decade ago, hindsight is always 20/20. As you say, anyone with a "deep understanding" could have thought of the idea but the fact remains that nobody did.
"I oppose anyone who wants to use them offensively" - The corporations that are now whinning about paying $4 per chip are the same ones that pushed hard for US IP laws to be adopted under the recently signed free trade agreement. To me, (an Aussie), it is poetic justice when a "non-profit" can screw a cartel of the largest "for-profits" with thier own rules. Before the 1980's corporations used to buy CSIRO patents for a pitance and the Australian public would watch as Agri-corps and Drug-pushing-corps turned govt funded research into a private cash cow. The use of licenses to make "for-profits" pay for basic research is one of CSIRO's greatest innovations.
Some examples of IP idiocy in Australia, patent for the wheel, Ugg boots.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics begs to differ on the supposed "rapidly rising crime rate".
Did anyone read the second article? "One former executive of a top-ranked computer maker alleges the organization is asking a $4 licensing fee for each chipset using OFDM technology, amounting to up to 70 percent of a chipset's price" Personally, I think CSIRO's patents should be observed. But I found very little except this tidbit to explain the actions of the companies brining the action. Big groups of competing companies don't band together to bring an expensive legal action unless they have a very clear incentive. (speculating here) It may very well be that this step is being taken because while $4 doesn't sound like very much it is inhibiting putting wireless technology in very simple low priced devices or devices with a very low margin? Does anyone know if CSIRO was approached about altering the price structure and refused? A $4 skim off the top of a $1500 centrino-equipped laptop isn't much. But a $4 skim off a $12 USB Wireless fob is pretty harsh.