CSIRO Wireless Patent Reaffirmed In US Court

An anonymous reader writes ""The CSIRO has won a landmark US legal battle against Buffalo Technology, under which it could receive royalties from every producer of wireless local area network (WLAN) products worldwide." From the article: "The patent, granted to CSIRO in 1996, encompasses elements of the 802.11a/g wireless technology that is now an industry standard. It stems from a system developed by CSIRO in the early '90s, 'to exchange large amounts of information wirelessly at high speed, within environments such as offices and homes,' said a CSIRO spokeswoman."

Comments

Who to the what, now?

[RobertB-DC]

Something that might have been helpful to include in the story submission:

*Note for International media: CSIRO is the national research agency of the Australian Government. It undertakes scientific research for the purpose of assisting Australian industry, furthering the interests of the Australian community and contributing to the achievement of national objectives.

(Source: a previous press release about the case)

Re:patents are 10 years long

[CrimsonAvenger]

20. Patents are 20 years long.

Re:Say What?

[StArSkY]

it's called precedent. By winning this one, every other company will pay rather than fight, because the judges will refer to the buffalo case.

Re:Say What?

[Tmack]

How can they collect royalties from Buffalo for every wireless device sold in the world? Does buffalo technology own the patent for that? Wouldn't that mean that companies like Netgear blah blah blah

RTFA... to answer all your questions, YES. They (CSIRO) own the patent, which evidently covers technology that lead to the standard and would mean royalties from most wireless (802.11a/g) devices worldwide, and they are going after the others (Netgear was specifically mentioned) as well...seriously, RTFA!

tm

Looks like a legit patent....

[Kenja]

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5487069.html
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5487069.pdf

Its more or less a means of generating multi pathed radio signals with CRC checking from packet data. So long as they're not greedy with the royalties, more power to em.

Re:Looks like a legit patent....

[sk0pe]

Uhh, yeah. You're ignoring the fact that this suit is a COUNTER-suit. They're suing Buffalo to prevent the patent being rule invalid. Sounds like CSIRO were happy to continue as things were until the manufacturers decided to apply for an invalidation of the patent.

Re:Looks like a legit patent....

[Kyro]

From what I can remember (no source sorry) the reason it took so long was because until the US-Australia FTA was signed 2 years ago or whatever, there was no reason for Intel/Buffalo etc to be worried about getting sued.

When the FTA was signed, they realised they could get sued so they went to court to invalidate the patent and CSIRO counter-claimed.

Something along those grounds anyway.

Re:patents are 10 years long

[bluephone]

Even more specifically, it's 20 years from the date of application or 17 years from teh date of issue, whichever is longer. This helps prevent entities form being shorted if it takes ten years to work through the patent system before being granted.

Re:patents are 10 years long

[OldAndSlow]

An Aussie patent only applies in Aussieland, not in the US. Ergo, a ruling in US court means they have a US patent.

Maybe not just coming to light now

[Chuck Chunder]

According to CSIRO they have been selling licences to companies it's just an issue now because it's now that this "Buffalo Technology" company has decided it doesn't want to pay.

Re:Patent and standards

[Shanep]

A technology will have a very hard time being standardized if someone holds the patent. However, in this case and others, nobody realized the patent issue when it was being pushed as a standard. Many years later, when everyone is using it, the patent holder comes out and claims the ownership and starts to collect payments. It's too late to correct the mistake. If the patent holder had been saying so from the beginning, it would not have had a chance to grow such a market value.

I think there should be some laws to restrict such a practice.

That is not what happened in this case. The patent holder was "holding back" in this case because they had no option. It was an Australian patent against a US corporation. Now that the FTA is in force, this has opened the opportunity not only for the Australian patent holder to enforce their patent in the US, but also for the US corporation to challenge the Australian patent in court. Guess what? The greedy US corportation challenged the CSIRO, an honorable scientific research entity, in court to have their patent invalidated. So naturally, as is required to retain a patent, the CSIRO had to defend their patent to keep it.

The CSIRO are good people. They do lots of good things for the good of not just Australia, but the World.

This court case was brought against them, the CSIRO, in an attempt to invalidate their rightful patent. If you do not defend your patent, you lose it.

So here we have a case where a money motivated corporation is trying to stomp on a scientific research entity (which only strives to further the state of the art), so that the corportation can make more money. Thankfully the scientific research entity came out on top.

There is patent abuse in this story, but it most certainly is NOT from the CSIRO. Thankfully that abuse failed.