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Wi-Fi Patent Victory Earns CSIRO $200 Million
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports the patent battle between Australia's CSIRO and 14 of the world's largest technology companies has gained the research organization $200 million from out of court settlements. CSIRO executive director of commercial, Nigel Poole, said the CSIRO were wanting to license their technology further, stating that he 'urged' companies using it to come forward and seek a license. 'We believe that there are many more companies that are using CSIRO's technology and it's our desire to license the technology further,' Poole said.'We would urge companies that are currently selling devices that have 802.11 a,g or n to contact CSIRO and to seek a license because we believe they are using our technology.'"
Gay.
oh BSD is dead and Beowol.. whatever...
Pat on the back for CSIRO. One of the ways government-owned research organizations can expect to survive is by monetizing inventions - when companies like Lucent, Buffalo, Linksys, Apple etc. all make a killing off this stuff and didn't invest in its development it is only fair they are forced to pay up.
? A example of another way would patents could be held to mitigate this would be. That the patent holder has all rights to sell and license a technology however a co-inventer who developed the technology independently has the right to produce and sell goods and services using the technology. Like I said its a slippery slope but patent law is already complicated enough so its just a drop in a bucket
Patent trolls seems to pop up everywhere.
Isn't this an indication that the system is severely flawed when someone pops up very late to the table and claims that they own it?
So limit the patent possibility to physical inventions that you can touch. Softwares and methods are too easy to re-invent all over again, and who can tell if a certain solution has been available before and then silently put to the grave for one reason or another?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It was also the first time the research organization had seen a surplus in its financial reporting http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26209952-12377,00.html
So much text for an article that can be summarized as:
Patent Troll: "It is our desire to collect money from our patented technology that we license but don't actually make."
Noticeably absent from the list of defendents-to-be: Cisco. Not because they aren't infringing on any patents, but because the name is too close to CISRO that it would confuse a jury. Would be fun if they thought CISRO was a knockoff. ^^
Isn't this an indication that the system is severely flawed when someone pops up very late to the table and claims that they own it?
[...] Softwares and methods are too easy to re-invent all over again, and who can tell if a certain solution has been available before and then silently put to the grave for one reason or another?
Speaking of trolls, you are one yourself. Before you mod me into oblivion, hear me out.
In your post, you seem to claim that (1) CSIRO is a patent troll; and that (2) the patent is a software patent, thus is unethical. Both claims are patently false. (ha ha)
For starters, to address claim (1), CSIRO is not a patent troll. What is a patent troll? A patent troll is an organisation that exists only to accumulate patents (and make a profit off royalties). CSIRO is not a patent troll! They are an Australian Government-funded organisation that does real research. They actually researched and patented the technology back in the early '90s. (Source)
To address claim (2), the patent in question is not a software patent! Thus the entire basis for your argument...
Softwares and methods are too easy to re-invent all over again, and who can tell if a certain solution has been available before and then silently put to the grave for one reason or another?
...is completely baseless. The patent in question covers the duplication and redundancy of radio waves, so it is obviously not a software patent. Basically the patent covers the way modern WiFi works, in that instead of serial (just one radio wave with error correction), parallel and redundant streams are sent, which allows you to have much greater bandwidth without losing the reliability. (And yes, that source again)
ah, so I should be sending CSIRO the medical bills for my wifi allergy shots!
Obvious troll is...
obvious
Er, according to this article:
What "savaging" are you talking about?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
And even then I suspect most Australian tax payers would like CSIRO to fund itself to the degree it can and would think it reasonable that the actual users of a technology would pay where that is feasable.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
What do you bet there are a few alternatives coming down the pipe soon? IBM, Apple, Intel, everybody coming out with the 'better wireless networking' technology.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Government-owned organizations are paid for by taxes. Why should I pay once for the invention by taxes and then again through licensing fees?
I'm not so sure. It's not my area, but this patent sounds like it might be an engineering solution, a simple application of known techniques, instead of an invention. The fact that a standards body decided to use this technology (either not knowing about the patent or deliberately ignoring it) also suggests that this is not actually a new technology.
Can you explain what you think is novel and unobvious about this technology?
Anonymous troll is...
anonymous
Wireless networking was developed by amateur radio operators, not by CSIRO. By the time CSIRO filed its patent (1996), you already could buy WLAN hardware commercially. CSIRO patented some specific techniques that happened to be present in several standards, but it's not even clear whether what they patented is an engineering solution (not patentable) or a true invention (patentable). That's why companies decided to challenge their patent in court.
This details precisely what CSIRO is supposed to do. Note that 8a refers to Australia rather a lot.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
From the summary, doesn't it bother anyone that Nigel Poole isn't the director of anything. He's the director of an adjective or adverb. "Director of Commercial".
Director of Commercial WHAT? Commercial Espionage? Commercial Litigation? Commercial Applications of Research? Or maybe he's Director of Television Commercials? Who can tell?
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Samzenpus successfully trolls Slashdot's Australian membership, Slashdot's ad revenue increases accordingly from the resultant bleating.
for Fast Fourier Transform and multi spectrum rf echo cancelation!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's a valid patent? How does it compare then if BSD patented their government-funded work?
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.
The government announced that CSIRO's funding allocation for next year will be reduced by a one-off amount of $200 million.
The savings will be used to fund a series of very large plaques in school gyms where, by pure coincidence, most polling booths are set up during federal elections.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2708730.htm
If you're lucky, this might work in your region.
Many thanks. There seems to be a local server for ABC content. Halfway through watching it now and it's quite informative
CSIRO exists because it's publicly funded. It's publicly funded because it's supposed to benefit the public and create research results usable by everybody.
It's publicly funded, yes, but by the people of Australia,, not of the people of other nations. In that sense CSIRO are absolutely entitled to obtain license fees from international companies. I'd also argue that they are entitled to collect fees from Australian companies since that should then allow them to decrease their funding from Australian tax payers.
Interesting viewpoint. How much does Oz contribute to DARPA for the use of internet?
Or to England for Penicillin?
According to the wonderful BBC documentary, "Breaking the Mould",, Florey, the Australian heading the team, was completely against patenting the technology needed to produce it in sufficient quantities, even though one of his colleagues insisted he should.
Because it was needed during the war, it was shown to a US pharmaceutical(?) company who did patent the process, which meant that the original inventors would have to pay for their own invention.
No b...
If the taxpayer funds the research, the taxpayer owns the results. Nobody should be able to patent something that came about because of taxpayer-funded research.
Furthermore, patented technology shouldn't be allowed to make it into "standards." "Standards" should be open and unencumbered. It's fundamentally anti-competitive to standardize on encumbered technology.
I'm not for letting patents mess around with science and technology, but they do have their place. A lot of members of Internet communities seem to damn patents and copyrighting because it is so harmful to software engineering. And yes, I DO think that copyrighting and closed-source development have no place in software engineering, because keeping that kind of work hushed up does not benefit the science. But as an Australian studying both physics and software engineering I feel that there is a big difference between propriety software that has everyone on the Internet outraged and the licensing of technology. I feel that the CSIRO are an organisation that Australia can be proud of and some of their research will benefit human kind long after any patents have expired. If I end up working for the CSIRO I would want my work to be licensed. Not for the money or because it would be my "right", but because it would help with the continuation of excellent scientific research in Australia and Earth as a whole. If, however, I end up working as a programmer, I would rather give my code away and go hungry than have it all hushed up for the sake of a money hungry corporation, because transparency in software is beneficial to the science. That is not to say that software shouldn't be licensable or sellable, just that it should be visible - as the CSIRO's technologies often are. So before you all start squabbling over who should pay an extra five bucks for a wiFi card, think about what you're buying for the future. Outrage over copyrighting that stunts progress is fair, outrage over investing a few dollars into the advancement of technology is petty.
THE INTERNET.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Why isn't packet radio prior art for this? People were sharing bits over radio long before wifi.
They didn't.
And one reason is that software patents are not accepted.
This is a hardware patent, requires an FFT chip which CSIRO invented.
The tech companies seem to believe that CSIRO's patent is obvious and thus shouldn't have been granted. Is there any merit to this claim? Everyone seems to be either jumping to CSIRO (all the people with mod points seem to be on their side) or the tech companies defense without even thinking about the actual patent they are trying to enforce.
So, I see all of the posts coming to the defense of CSIRO, and I get them. I truly do.
However, there is still one thing I do not get: Why is CSIRO going (and why have they been allowed to go) after the companies selling the final piece of complete, end-user hardware in a shrink-wrap box, rather than the chipset manufacturers themselves? Isn't it Broadcom, Atheros, Intel, Ralink, Realtek, etc., who failed to license the technology? It seems to me that the company who takes the chipset and slaps their name on the front of a plastic box that contains it has become an unwitting victim in all of this. Most of these companies don't even really have their own designs. The original Broadcom reference design was tweaked by Gemtek and then rebranded by Linksys, Buffalo, and many, many others, for example...most of these companies buy their stuff from an ODM and barely do any of their own actual engineering and are just sales and marketing warehouses.
So why are all the actual chipset manufacturers getting off scott-free?
-- Nathan
Let's make our own wireless standard, give it away to CSIRO and then charge them for it some years later. Yeah, screw those guys!
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
The precursor to Wi-Fi was invented in 1991 by NCR Corporation/AT&T (later Lucent Technologies & Agere Systems) in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. It was initially intended for cashier systems; the first wireless products were brought on the market under the name WaveLAN with speeds of 1 Mbit/s to 2 Mbit/s. Vic Hayes, who held the chair of IEEE 802.11 for 10 years and has been named the "father of Wi-Fi," was involved in designing standards such as IEEE 802.11b, and 802.11a.
Those guy's just bought the patent they didn't really do anything.
Next thing they will be saying they own parts of linux.
I guess Australia owns Citizen's Band as well. Because Wifi is essential based on radio waves. Therefore Cellphones are well within their domain.
Your dating is a bit off. Try Charles Frederic Gauss in 1805 for the first documented description of FFTs, just mostly forgotten for 160 years. It didn't become popular widely until 1965. After which it became used all over the place in hardware and software. I studied FFT application in college engineering and programming classes. FFTs have been common knowledge in engineering for 20 years or more. Making it into a hardware chip might have been new, but certainly not novel.
Everyone wanted to put FFTs into chips, since they began making chips and certainly DSPs. I'm fairly sure many video cards implement FFTs and probably 90% of all DSPs. Not sure when CSIRO did this, but it must be longer than any US patent (Thompson implemented a VLSI FFT chip in 1979) would be valid for. The University of Goettingen has Gauss' works on-line you could go there to verify it. But then you'd probably have to learn German and maybe Latin (although, IIRC they translated the Latin stuff). There were others doing FFT algorithm in the span from 1805 to the 1965 popularization you speak of, although you're off by about five years there, too..
I haven't read CSIRO patent so don't know if it was novel or not, but you're wrong about the FFT part in many ways.
Well... considering they invented this back in 93/94.