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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.'"
Oh crap, I just missed out on my third Fist Post. The wording of the summary has inflammatory overtones. OK, so a bunch of sandal-and-beige-polyester-shorts (regulation CSIRO uniform) wearing radiophysicists used their skills and worked hard at solving a problem that the simpler old Wavelan modems didn't deal with - how to handle much higher bit rates than 2Mbit in an office or home due to shorter bit periods and smooshing of the signal by reflections. Their employer spent a lot of money protecting their R&D investment worldwide and is finally reaping the benefits. This is how it's meant to work - alas CSIRO had to do battle and legal gymnastics in courts to get the so called free-trade partners to do the right thing. The problem with patents is that you need to spend a imperial crapload of money registering them as far and wide as you can and a metric shit-tonne of money for good lawyers defending them when necessary. What I want to know is, what cut does CSIRO get of my $35 802.11N Tenda access point? 2c?
This is the team lead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_O'Sullivan_(engineer) I think he is doing just fine. And as an Australian citizen I would rather all this lovely money go back to CSIRO so they can carry on their work.
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.
Hahaha for almost a century? Hyperbole much? You do realize that the Berne Convention and the predecessor organization of WIPO were both created by European countries and the US wasn't involved at all, right? The US didn't even become a signatory of the Berne Convention until 1988. So, no, you are quite wrong. It wasn't even until the late 60s that the US even got involved in international trade bodies such as WIPO. But don't let facts get in the way of your rant.
Seconded. No trolling here. They want reasonable payments for creating clever algorithms and techniques for dealing with interference. Sure, it was based on existing technologies, but choosing what technologies to use and combining them correctly and effectively was a difficult and unique proposition, and I think a patentable idea.
They even shopped the technology to actual companies to make products based on it, no go.
Also, it seems that their is a claim that the IEEE standards group was aware of the patent and used the technology. Happens all the time.
So, they finally to court to get royalties for use of the patented technology. Seems to me they exhausted other avenues. Companies were dismissive of their idea as "obvious". Well, in hindsight, why wouldn't it be? So, they went to court.
Good for them. Sure, they venue shopped, but they accepted a pretty reasonable settlement from a large group of companies that greatly profited from the invention.
Bonus, the money goes back to basic research.
...which is exactly what 'civil servants' are supposed to do, and is arguably more important than anything else they do or say.
They're Australia's national science body, the equivalent of NAS in the US. Thier traditional role is to report to government in matters of science. The organization is nobody's lap dog, in the late 50's early 60's they were the ones who showed the causal link between high levels of plutonium in childeren's bones and atmosphereic nuke testing. Nearly two's decade before the French attack on the rainbow warrior, these guys were telling governments and newspapers why it should stop, even though they were under enormus pressure from the Australian and UK goverments to STFU and concentrate on killing those fucking rabbits.
For at least the last decade, possibly longer, one side of parliment has relentlessly sought to soil the CSIRO's reputation because their climate reseach, ( which tells us we're shiting in our own nest ), offends the industry that is laying the golden shovels. From my personal POV the luddites with the golden shovels have failed in their efforts to assasinate the character of a group of exceptional 'civil servants', in fact they have significantly increased my respect for the integrity of the institution and the people within it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Not signing onto agreements then peddling stolen goods is also bullying other countries with the US' insane views on patents and copyright. Berne is perfectly reasonable and fair, the predecessor to WIPO was largely fair, indeed EU rules on copyright and patents are almost entirely intelligent.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I could be off-base about the above assumptions, but they are what I've gathered from reading the various articles I could find actually discussing the patents technically and from reading the patent description itself. I'm not a radiophysicist/engineer, so I could be missing something which would be obvious to one.
Knowing the work that these guys do and have been doing for decades now (I was doing radio astrophysics), but not having read the patent, I strongly suspect it relates to the interferometry work they have been doing for the Australia Telescope Compact Array national facility. Interferometry allows (extremely) directional signal detection from omnidirectional antennae, and simularly directional radio frequency interference mitigation.
A crucial part of radio interferometry is doing Fourier transforms. Getting large amounts of bandwidth necessitates doing this in hardware, in parallel. The precursor projects for the Square Kilometre Array mean these parallel calculations needs to be done quickly (realtime), large bandwidth (the frequency range from the sky would ideally be spread over many gigahertz), and massively parallel (terrahertz digital signals prior to data reduction). So need to be done cheaply and in hardware.
The mathematical techniques are highly non-obvious (and extremely neat). These guys pioneered the mass production of the miniaturised supercheap hardware involved. Yes, they outsourced it, but they most certainly did design it all. This all took quite a lot of investment and innovation. The real point of patents.