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The Story Behind Australia's CSIRO Wi-Fi Claims
An anonymous reader writes "U.S. consumers will be making a multimillion dollar donation to an Australian government agency in the near future, whether they like it or not. After the resolution of a recent lawsuit, practically every wireless-enabled device sold in the U.S. will now involve a payment to an Australian research organization called the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO, which hired U.S. patent lawyers who told a very lucrative tale in an East Texas courtroom, that they had '[invented] the concept of wireless LAN ... [and] when the IEEE adopted the 802.11a standard in 1999 — and the more widely-used 802.11g standard years later — the group was choosing CSIRO technology. Now CSIRO had come to court to get the payments it deserved.'"
U.S. government - and therefore U.S. people and consumers who voted and allow the government to continue - have been bullying other countries with their insane views on patents and copyrights for almost a century. Oh what you say now, don't like it when other countries do the exact thing you have been doing for a long time. Cry me a river.
It's not a donation, it's payment for use of the technology which was developed and then patented.
Having a troll as a story - kudos!
Unlike patent trolls, CSIRO actually creates technology through research.
They deserve payment, unlike most who file their claims through East Texas.
American customers aren't the only ones who'll be paying. Just the only ones who refused to without a lawsuit over the issue.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Controversy and flamebait generate page-views as outraged nationalists and functionally incompetent OS bigots click and re-click to see how people react to their irrelevant options. This is extremely predictable, and generates ad income. Slashdot editors know this.
John Dvorak and other fucktard "pundits" realized this a long time ago and turned it into a career.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
What a slimy article. The writer is doing a few dishonest thing here... First, he exaggerates the claims being made. Nobody ever claimed Austraila invented WiFi, in fact, what they said is later in TFA: . "CSIRO did not invent the concept of wireless LAN, it just invented the best way of doing it, the best way it's used now throughout the world," Furniss told the jury in 2009.
Second, he does some iirrelevant hand-waving, talking about IEEE defining the standard, talking about WiFi (802.11b presumably) existing before CSIRO's patent, asking a rep from one company if he'd heard of CISRO, etc. All this is completely irrelevant. Either the WiFi standards in question use technologies that CISRO developed and patented, or they don't. Everything else is pointless distraction from the topic at-hand.
Third, he tries to just lump them in with patent trolls... guilt by association. These other companies are making baseless claims about WiFi, and CISRO is suing over WiFi, ergo, CISRO's claims MUST be baseless as well. It's a bit like insurance companies claiming that, because there are some frivilous lawsuits against them, EVERY suit against them MUST be frivilous.
Nowhere in the article is there ANY discussion at all about the patented technologies in question, and whether CISRO's patented technology is, in-fact, integrated into the 802.11 standards. That's what matters, and that's what the author doesn't want to talk about at all.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Either an idea is obvious, or it isn't, it doesn't change in hindsight vs foresight.
You said a lot that made sense until you got here.
The most brilliant and elegant solutions to problems out there are often painfully obvious once they've been pointed out, but it still took that one creative thinker to realize it.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Bullshit. The patents MOSAID holds are ones they got from Agere Systems, not CSIRO. The fact that CSIRO is the one doing the suing in this case kind of gives it away that they didn't sell them. Obviously.
And the IEEE disagrees that what they did was not inventive, when they asked for a licensing agreement for the CSIRO patents. Which were developed with taxpayer money. I'm pretty sure you'd be very pissed off if your government did some research on your dime then gave it away for free to everyone else in the world. I'm sure you'd be asking what your government is doing spending your money to help overseas companies.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
It being obvious after it's explained, does not make something obvious, it makes it a good explanation, one could suggest that is very close to the nature of a valid patent.
No they actually put implemented it in silicon (which is WHY they ere granted a patent). Because they are not a commercial company, they didn't mass produce it (which the Ars article seems to take as meaning they didn't implement it).