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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.
Before posting a link to this article, perhaps you should have read it. Ars is usually pretty good, but the fact that they allowed this incredibly biased piece of crap be published in their site makes me ashamed to go there.
There have been many good articles posted about the CSIRO's fight to get a reasonable royalty out of all these companies that agreed to pay one right at the beginning of the process. This is not one of them.
Nice summary there, painting the CSIRO as some kind of patent troll. They never claimed that they had "[invented] the concept of wireless LAN", they claimed that they had developed some very clever algorithms dealing with rejecting interference and the like. This is the work of a serious research organization, and without it wireless networks would be a lot less useful.
Go flame on an actual patent troll, or do your basic research yourself.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
I thought Kevin Flynn had that idea back in 1989?
It's not a donation, it's payment for use of the technology which was developed and then patented.
Ignoring the validity of the patent, IEEE was aware that it might be needed. http://standards.ieee.org/about/sasb/patcom/loa-802_11a-csiro-04Dec1998.pdf
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.
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.
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
the CSIRO had found a technique to heavily inteference and transmission of wireless signals
at the same time consortiums threw significantly more money at the problem couldn't come up with a better solution
yes, IEEE started the standards process before the patent was filed
unlike most patent filings today, CSIRO had already developed the hardware
also unlike today, you don't have to file a patent the second you come up with an idea
after years of tech consortiums failing at an alternative, IEEE asked for use of the "patent"
CSIRO agreed to it becoming part of the standard on the basis of receiving royalties
(just like any other corporation or patent holder would demanded)
the problem being CSIRO never got any royalties
the article "writer" expected the CSIRO, after years of companies not honouring their agreement, to simply roll-over and bugger off
but who's at fault here? the CSIRO for asking for what they were told they'd get, or the companies using the patrent for free?
from what i can tell, the companies were hoping to play the waiting game
thinking the next iteration of wireless tech could work without the patent
so if you wait long enough, you can profit all you need from it's use, then expect a small payout years (decades?) later when the patent is superceded
unfortunately for the companies, the patent still applies today as it did when the standard was formed
also, the writer upfront says the CSIRO sued for $4 per device
he makes no mention of how much the original royalty was for
which if the companies paid it in the first place, they would be making this "donation"
i mean ffs. the writer says CSIRO is commonly called "si-roh"
it's never been called that outside of small pocket of idiots thinking CSIRO is a word rather than an acronym
so either Joe Mullin got trolled hard by certain "fact" presented to him, or he was lazy and didn't do research
overall i'd put this to the public:
would you rather pay your "donation" to government research organisation, or to a technology corporation?
The CSIRO did indeed invent the wireless technology which we all use in wireless LANs today. However, they're a government-funded agency, they should be creating technology for the good of all citizens of the world and making that technology available for free.
As far as I'm concerned, my Australian Tax dollars have already paid the CSIRO for this work. They're not patent trolls but I disagree with their actions to assert royalty payments over this patent.
Ethernet took ideas from ALOHAnet, which was a wireless system.
They DIDN'T. There's documentation to prove IEEE knew of the CISRO patent. IIRC, they first requested free usage, and when CISRO refused, they request FRAND licensing, and when they agreed, went forward with the standard.
Yes it would have, but the IEEE found the technology they developed as compelling enough to tie themselves to required licensing on that patent. Maybe 802.11g would have been slower, less resilient to interference, etc. Whatever the case, they did use this tech, and need to license it.
Either an idea is obvious, or it isn't, it doesn't change in hindsight vs foresight. If someone spends a mil to develop something after someone else developed and patented it, too bad, that doesn't make it obvious. Besides, it would be far, far too easy to defraud the legitimate inventor, just claiming so-and-so hasn't seen the patent, but came up with the same thing.
Right now, the burden of proof for overturning a patent is too high, but throwing more rules and schemes and exceptions won't solve the problem, it'll make it worse... and even bigger mess you need more lawyers and money to avoid getting screwed-over by.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Let me start by saying that the money CSIRO will be receiving on the WiFi patents is well deserved.
However, I'm not so sure wether this is such a massive win for CSIRO in the end. The reason for this is that it takes a lot of effort to patent things on top of researching them. This one set of WiFi patents will surely pay for itself but what about all the other patents which are not so lucrative?
Meanwhile CSIRO is paying patent attorneys and patent agencies throughout the world instead of paying Australian scientists to do science work. It would perhaps be enlightening to see some numbers. I know for a fact that numbers of scientists at some CSIRO divisions have been dropping significantly. Is this a sign of good health?
CSIRO is a public body. I'm not sure it should patent anything. Actually I'm not sure it should conduct business the way it does now.
Disclaimer: former CSIRO employee here.
w00t!!!!
I Am The Two Percent!
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
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.
I know the guy - he works in an office down the hall from my PhD supervisor. He's currently working on phased array feeds for the new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope, which let it see 30x as much of the sky at once as a conventional radio telescope. I don't know what fraction of these feeds was his idea, but I assume it was significant. If we're really lucky, perhaps the technology they develop will turn out to be as useful as that mentioned in the fine article.
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.
...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.
I only briefly looked at the patent, and it looks like it's simply the application of OFDM to wireless communication between computers. OFDM, for those who aren't very familiar, is a way to deal with linear time invariant systems that can corrupt the data. For example, you can consider the signal going from one antenna to the other as going through such a system. Since these types of systems will only modify the amplitude and phase of each frequency band separately, instead of mixing them together as would be the case in the time domain, you encode the information you want to send as specific frequencies. For example, if you send out a wireless signal and it echoes all over the place, the time domain signal gets all mixed up and "slushy". However, if you perform a Fourier transform on the input signal and the output signal, you'll notice that the echoing only caused frequency bands to individually get attenuated/magnified and/or shifted in phase, but none of the frequency bands has mixed together. OFDM exploits this property to provide for robust communication (well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general gist of it). However, it sounds like this patent is simply saying "hey, OFDM is good for wireless communication", which feels kind of obvious to me considering the point of OFDM.
Slashdot is increasingly becoming a platform for conspiracy theorists and political agendas; Maybe it's time for slashdot to post a story on the increase in shameless bias in slashdot articles?