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.'"

Comments

Re:Absolute crap article

[poetmatt]

Bullshit.

There is no reasonable royalty that exists when you are using MOSAID for patent extortion and are not suing those manufacturing the devices but the end users.

There's two phrase for it.

One is: patent shakedown
the other is: patent misuse.