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Australian WiFi Inventors Win US Legal Battle

Posted by samzenpus on from the piece-of-the-pie dept.

First time accepted submitter Kangburra writes "Australian government science body CSIRO said Sunday it had won a multi-million-dollar legal settlement in the United States to license its patented technology that underpins the WiFi platform worldwide. Scientists from the agency invented the wireless local area network (WLAN) technology that is the basis of the WiFi signal employed by computers, smartphones and other Internet-ready devices around the world."

1 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who picks these "standards" anyway? by russotto · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    It's nothing to do with "standards" at all. It's solely about technology which makes wifi work indoors without signal echo. They came up with the solution to the issue, patented it, then everyone else adapted it without licensing the technology.

    Except that's not actually what happened. They wrote a patent broad enough to cover existing technology (OFDM) and got the courts to buy it.

    (and to anticipate one of the usual pro-patent lines, no, they do not deserve a patent for describing a wireless LAN based on OFDM, when both wireless LANs and OFDM were pre-existing)