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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."
Honestly, if anything will scream for patent reform, it's when the cities with municipal wi-fi start getting sued...
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
they would use this finding to stop the manufacture of all infringing devices in the world, except the ones that are made in Australia. Seeing as the charter of the CSIRO is to produce research which exclusively benefits Australian business, that's what they should be doing.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Thanks for the links. My fear initially was that this was just another craptastic submarine patent.
But here's a question. 802.11a has been a standard a long time, in development long before its acceptance. Why is it that the patents that apply to the technology that this standard is based off just NOW coming to light? Why were patent/royalty issue not brought up in 1999 or earlier?
It seems kind of shady to me to wait until after the standard was released (1999), after wide spread US adoption (2001), after world wide adoption (2003), until years later when the technology is so prolific that companies that have based their entire success on the technologies covered by the patents have no option to change to a non-infringing technology. Or has this been a 7+ year long court case?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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.
I want my tax dollars paid back, with interest, then. If the government supported any part of the research, it only follows that the government funders (aka taxpyers) should reap the rewards.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Well, we'd get them back indirectly. The CSIRO has stated in their press release that they plan to use any money from royalty payments to fund further research. This means that we, the taxpayers, don't have to.
Waking Up - There must be a better way to start the day.
Before the end of the 1940s CSIRO's predecessor developed and test ran the world's "fifth electronic stored program computer", later known as CSIRAC. In 1954 widely venerated Prime Minister Robert Menzies decided that CSIRO should drop research on computers in favour of cloud seeding. (The back stories would fill a book without getting to Pig Iron Bob presenting my undergraduate degree.)
Then in the early 1980s microprocessor technology faciliated the emergence of a promising embryonic computer hardware industry, but quiz king turned science minister Barry Jones announced that we had already missed the boat, and corporate misdeals soon mopped up the few threatening survivors. (I prepared supplements covering 40+ local maunfacturers for Australian Micro Computerworld in each of its two years of publication, 1983-84, before it was swept away by the PCWorld/Macworld tidal waves, having put on a government-supported professional development conference for those manufacturers in 1983.)
That's all folks!
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
The number of cases where a patent holder waits until a patent is worth something before doing anything are numerous: GIF and RSA to name but two well known cases.
It is similar for OpenBSD and CARP (vs Cisco's VRRP) - even though they've asked Cisco if their are ok, Cisco not responding does not give them the green light - and to this day I'm not aware of Cisco responding.
In the end, the only way you can settle a dispute/question over "do you infringe" is in court.
As for CSIRO, well, they came up with the idea years before anyone else and have successfully patented a very worthwhile technology. To me that makes them a very useful research and development centre, probably the kind of place you want to be involved with so that you can share in the research and royalties from future patents.
Further, there is nothing about patents that means they cannot be used "for the common good". In this case maybe it is more fool of those that sued CSIRO in the first place.
It would be nice if most of the replies on this thread just "got over it".
RTFP (p=patent). The patent is NOT for wireless networks. It is for high speed (ie. 10GHz) wireless networks using a specific technology to give those high speeds.