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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?
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.
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