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CSIRO Sues US Carriers Over Wi-Fi Patent
An anonymous reader notes that CSIRO has sued Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile in — wait for it — East Texas District Court. "Australia's peak science body stands to reap more than $1 billion from its lucrative Wi-Fi patent after already netting about $250 million from the world's biggest technology companies, an intellectual property lawyer says. The CSIRO has spent years battling 14 technology giants including Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo, and Toshiba for royalties and made a major breakthrough in April last year when the companies opted to avoid a jury hearing and settle for an estimated $250 million. Now, the organization is bringing the fight to the top three US mobile carriers in a new suit targeting Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile. It argues they have been selling devices that infringe its patents."
Here's what I have on their previous trolling:
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I think this lawsuit is not good for CSIRO's reputation. I understand the temptation to earn lots of millions, but in the end this will not serve them.
First let us put things into perspective. CSIRO has not come up with intellectual property worth $1B very often. Lots of more or less useful things, but the wifi patent is basically unique. The Aussie govt pays the 6000 employees salaries every year, at a cost of about $1B *every year*.
Yet there are companies like IBM who license their IP worldwide for many billions every year. So color me unimpressed. If this patent is the best CSIRO scientists can do, this sucks. Many companies can do a lot more every year.
CSIRO does nothing of what is commonly referred to as "Big Science", like at the CERN, Tevatron, ITER, etc. Those cost many billions to *build*, even more to run. They have a small number of mid-size instruments like a 3.6m telescope and a few smaller ones. Some of those were burned in a bushfire a few years back near Canberra, and last I heard they are not going to replace them. They simply have no unique large equipment where people from all over the world flock to do their experiment. They used to have an almost monopoly on Southern skies astronomy, but not Chile (!) has much much better equipment. Due to irrational public fears against "radiations" readily conveyed by the media, Australia has a single tiny research reactor at a "safe" distance from Sydney, and opened their only reasonably sized synchrotron in 2007 in Melbourne !
CSIRO does very little of what is commonly referred to as "basic science". They have no proper math or physics department for instance. They do a lot of development work for industry. In Australia, basic science is done in the Universities.
Science can cost a lot of money. In general it is worth it, in the mid to long run, but if you spend only little, you are dependent on others for big results. The entire computer industry would not have existed without the basic physics research of the early 20th century. Think about that !
So by some definition, CSIRO is now a patent troll, I'm not surprised. When I left a few years ago, the place was run by lawyers, business development people and MBA-style managers. This lawsuit is not good news for the scientists at CSIRO, it will be further "proof" that CSIRO requires less appropriation and must do even more consulting. In Australia, science is seen as a cost center. This is madness, a country as rich as Australia is at the moment cannot hope to survive long selling coal, grain and providing banking and insurance to its own population. It should be using its current, short-lived wealth to become a beacon to the world.
Note; I was a CSIRO employee for 10 years, in the maths and statistics department, and I eventually found that both their funding and basic research policies royally sucked. This is even worse at Universities (I taught at U. of Sydney too). The best Australian scientists and researchers still emigrate to England or the USA, for instance the recent Fields medalist Terence Tao, probably one of the best all-around mathematicians since Poincare and Hilbert. What a waste !