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Australian WiFi Inventors Win US Legal Battle
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."
This lawsuit began years ago. They began suing people in 2005.
It's sad to see how much effort they had to go through. This case is EXACTLY what patents are for: a bunch of scientists did some research and patented the results - companies took their results and made commercial products out of that and believed they could get away with not paying any kind of royalty or license fee.
The vast majority of this money will go back into further research, slowly making the world a better place.
For those who care to know (PDF): Their Most Recent Annual Report.
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Actually, not too likely. The CSIRO is one of the few genuine research and development companies out there. The research they do is very useful to many Australians - and they do a considerable amount of work assisting third world countries with farming, food production and water sanitation. While they are taxpayer funded (being a government organisation), a good part of their research dollars come from patents on stuff they come up with. In this case, this is a patent that has been recognised by almost all the companies that make products with it as this snippet from Wikipedia explains:
In late November 2007, CSIRO won a lawsuit against Buffalo Technology, with an injunction that Buffalo must stop supplying AirStation products that infringe on the 802.11 patent.
On 19 September 2008, the Federal Circuit ruled in Buffalo’s favour and remanded the case to the district court ruling that the district court’s Summary Judgement was insufficient on the merits of obviousness of CSIRO’s patent. Therefore, this case was to be tried again before the district court. In this connection Buffalo was hopeful that it would shortly be permitted to, once again, sell IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g compliant products in the United States. On 13 July 2009 Buffalo announced the settlement of the patent infringement action.
As of 23 April 2009, the CSIRO has obtained settlements from most of the other organisations involved, including Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Asus, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Nintendo, Toshiba, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton and 3Com.
Furthermore, even this article on WIFI on Wikipedia has very explanatory information:
A large number of patents by many companies are used in 802.11 standard. In 1992 and 1996, Australian organisation the CSIRO obtained patents for a method later used in Wi-Fi to "unsmear" the signal. In April 2009, 14 tech companies agreed to pay CSIRO for infringements on the CSIRO patents. This lead to WiFi being attributed as an Australian invention.
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After, I believe, substantial attempts to get people to negotiate licences without involving a court.
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And long before that, they were trying to negotiate patent fees with the various vendors, but were ignored. The lawsuits were the last resort, and have mostly ended in the vendors settling. Revenues have been rolled back into a fund for future research. Read more here.
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As I understand it the Slashdot article is (predictably) rather misleading. The technology involved isn't wifi per se but a clever signal processing method used in newer wifi standards (IE 802.11 N). IIRC it's the bit which allows signals recieved at multiple antennas to be used in a way that identifies multiple distinct signals coming from different directions at the same time (an increasingly important feature as the the number of devices explodes).
It also demonstrates some of the benefits of a cross-specialisation science organisation like the CSIRO. IIRC the original idea was come up with (and used) by someone at CSIRO working in radio astronomy. More commercial uses were identified and they sought to commercialise it by licencing it to anyone who could make use of it.
This is not the case of a patent troll buying some patent and belatedly wielding it as a weapon in an established market nor a company leveraging a patent to hurt competitors. It's a genuine invention that they tried to licence but ultimately had to go to court over because the Wifi companies (perhaps not used to dealing with entities outside their patent clique) refused to licence.
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Nope, the CSIRO has done everything possible. They've been attempting good-faith licensing terms for years and getting rebuffed with "fuck off back Down Under, Aussie, you're dealing with the big boys now". They developed a technology that we all depend on and have been trying to get recognition of that fact for years.
I'm a nerd and I fucking hate patent trolls, but I'm applauding the CSIRO. They're the good guys in this fight.