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CSIRO Settles With Tech Giants Over WiFi Patent Spat
Combat Wombat brings news that the legal battle between the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO) and a host of major tech corporations has come to end, with a large settlement going to the CSIRO. The fight was over a patent on wireless LAN technology, which already earned the CSIRO a victory in court over Buffalo Technology and a settlement with Hewlett-Packard. The remaining 13 companies, which include Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Nintendo, have now chosen to settle as well. "[The CSIRO] will use the money won from a Wi-Fi technology patent battle to fund further research. ... It is unclear how much money has flowed to the CSIRO, but experts say the technology would be worth billions of dollars if royalties were paid on an ongoing basis."
I am going to patent the air that the radio waves travel through. That way they will owe me money.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I wonder, if patent-holders are justified in doing anything with their holdings, except donating them to public domain — in your opinion...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
CSIRO is funded by the Australian taxpayer and is fully entitled to recover money made by others from their patented discoveries. Neil
CISRO got a good deal with the settlement.
If it went to court, it probably would have been easy to fight. Since CISRO is south of the equator, the WiFi technology they developed is out of phase with what we use up here, so clearly different.
That's why Australian toilet manufacturers can't break into other big markets. The water spins the wrong way.
Dual Opteron < $600
Let's say I'm doing some cool scientific work in wireless communication stuff and I invent a cool method for communication over soda which is sure thousands of times more efficient than ethernet over fiber. Now, do I have to build a factory to make and commercialize my new cool NICs ? Or can I patent my idea, and get a share from whoever makes money out of it ? I think you get the point in this case.
Then do something with the research! Any organization that has the power to do research for the sake of research, should be scientific and not have the power to patent to begin with.
Why? Why should the Australian public fund research that companies such as Dell, Microsoft, Apple, etc can then just take for free and make billions off of?
If they'd followed due dilligence and gone to the CSIRO and licenced the technology, we wouldn't be having a discussion about whether the CSIRO deserved patent royalties for this technology that they "never implemented". You feel that the CSIRO is not obliged to royalties for this discovery because of the mistaken perception that they've just dreamed up this patent dispute as a way of extracting cash from companies which happen to accidentally cross onto their IP turf. That's usually the case with patent trolls, but this isn't a patent troll. They invented it, at their expense, and they were ripped off.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
All kidding aside, I really wish they would improve the entire patent system/process. Anyone that's familiar with Buffalo's wireless routers knows their products got pulled from shelves for months due to patent litigation. Yes, it hurts Buffalo, but it also hurts their customers. Is it really necessary to pull products off shelves while the litigation is going on? In the end, if the company is found not to be infringing, then business continues as usual. If it is infringing, then it pays some royalty based on number of infringing units sold. That sounds like a good way to make everyone happy without pulling products off shelves and destroying free market competition.
Between this and the most recent decision regarding Rambus RAM designs, it should be obvious that no technology used as a standard should be SECRETLY encumbered by a patent. Signatories PLANNING on a Standard could be declared in violation (and lose all royalties thereby) if relevant patent data is not disclosed. That is, when planning on a Standard, every party wishing to participate needs to sign something up-front regarding relevant information and the patent process (or else). This of course won't prevent a Standard from devising something that was patented by someone outside of the working group, unknown to anyone in the group, but it would cut down on deliberate attempts to Standardize a patented thing.
Or maybe companies should stop trying to think they can steal someone else's research and profit from it.
That statement implies the concepts you contrast are incompatiable, they are not. An organization that exisits only to maximize its own profit would willingly sacrifice people's freedoms and liberty, if that seemed to be the most convenient way to pursue this goal. Once upon a time, it was required to demonstrate how a corporation would provide a net benefit to society before a corporate charter could be issued (it would, in theory, be revoked if that benefit never materialized). However, that was a long time ago and the standards are far lower and few seem to remember that corporations were originally allowed to exisit by society, rather than having some intrinsic right to exisit. Therefore IMHO, anyone who values freedom and liberty should at least be suspicious of corporations in their modern form.
I wonder, if patent-holders are justified in doing anything with their holdings, except donating them to public domain -- in your opinion...
Well, they might be out of toilet paper...?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer