Slashdot Mirror
Is Australia's CSIRO a Patent Troll?
schliz writes "Australian tech publication iTnews is defining 'patent trolls' as those who claim rights to an invention without commercializing it, and notes that government research organization CSIRO could come under that definition. The CSIRO in April reached a $220 million settlement over three U.S. telcos' usage of WLAN that it invented in the early 1990s. Critics have argued that the CSIRO had failed to contribute to the world's first wifi 802.11 standard, failed to commercialize the wifi chip through its spin-off, Radiata, and chose to wage its campaign in the Eastern District courts of Texas, a location favored by more notorious patent trolls."
As an amateur photographer, I don't sell any of my photography. I do post it online for people to look at and enjoy, but I don't commercialize it.
As an open source software author, I also don't sell or commercialize any of my code - I license it for the most part under the GPL and have for years.
But in neither case does this mean others are free to take what I've created and do with it what I do not wish. You don't get to sell my photography for your own profit, you don't get to include my code in your commercial app, not without my permission. I've been in court over two photography infringements and won, and went damned near it for code I've written with others. I don't see why patents in a system that accepts them as valid (their validity is another entire argument) are any different. Creator gets the say...
Where does having actuallly done the damn work and in fact continuing to put their efforts into doing even more research fit into the patent troll definition?
Dingo dongers. Some companies are good at R&D, some at mass production. It's perfectly valid to specialise in one or the other.
Is an architect a troll if he doesn't dig his own foundations? Article's a bag of arse, mate.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
CSIRO actually does research. Patent trolls buy their patents.
No they are not patent trolls. They innovate as their primary purpose, and do not acquire patents from other organisations so they can collect royalties or litigate.
Based on this any research University or Organisation around the world would become a patent troll unless they start to use the 'research' aka patents they created. Let me spell it out for you, CSIRO stands for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation..... Its a Research Organisation that is funded partly by the Australian Govement and partly by the income it gains from patents it created based on its research. This what a Research Organisation do.... it works on new ideas, gets them to a usable stage and sells them on to other companies to use the idea/tech to make money. In return they get a cut of this all done via the patent system. Would slashdot dare call Stanford University or Harvard University a patent troll? Hell no... Poor IT world. CSIRO asked for payment based on companies using there research when all the IT companies tried to steal the idea and play the mob card, ie if no one pays we don't have to! CSIRO is very easy going and licences the work they do at very cheap prices, its not like they asked a over the top amount. Any money they do gain is feed back into future research projects and isn't paid out to shareholders or fat CEO's!
If the article heading is a question, then the answer is automatically...
NO.
Submit articles with real reporting please, the type that presents facts, instead of asking questions.
CSIRO have had this in the courts for years. All of these companies ignored the lawsuit and their own peril.
If you want to call a patent troll someone who says "This is a new invention. I'm taking you to court for taking my patent and using it without paying me, even though i've told you that you must pay for it", then yeah, they're a patent troll.
How about you suck my ball sack for repeating an argument you've already been slapped for.
CSIRO is anything but a patent troll. Period.
AC
maybe cos its a government research organisation, not a commercial company. maybe the difference is that many other government research orgs are quite happy to sink countless millions in taxpayer-funded grants into new tech that is merely ripped off by commercial companies, so that taxpayers get to pay for it twice-over.
what csiro does with patents in the commercial world is called "business".
i say good on csiro for working for their major shareholder - the aussie taxpayer.
many patents shouldn't have been issued, and if you did your homework you would realize that there is more in wifi tech than what wilcox and motorola have contributed. the difference between a lot of companies with patents and the csiro is that csiro actually invents things, rather that buying up patents like any commodity (hence they don't need to rip off motorola to make money from innovation).
CSIRO has been inventing things since before Motorola was even founded
If CSIRO is a patent troll then so is every major university. Stanford University's Office of Technology Licensing, for example, exists to generate income through the licencing of Stanford developed technologies which they then invest back into research and education. CSIRO similarly invests its income back into research and the Science and Industry Endowment Fund. The idea that research organisations are patent trolls and shouldn't be allowed to licence their inventions to others in order to maintain their focus on research is both farcical and intellectually bankrupt. Joe Mullin's jingoistic and, frankly, pathetically insular article isn't worth a second reading.
If they were truely patent trolls then they wouldn't do their own r&d, nor would they ask for a measly $220 million in total from a number of organisation. Considering how much these organisations make from using WLAN $220 million is a drop in the ocean.
1 "bag of arse" = How many "Library of Congresses" . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
CSIRO's predecessor was only around for about two years before Motorola sold their first car radio. CSIRO's goals at the time was to explain how to improve farm yields while preserving food and were doing work like the US Dept of Agriculture did at the time which was mostly trying to keep a US dust bowl type situation from happening in Australia.
CSIRO's contribution to wifi is very minimal and happens to have been used by others before they patented it.
It's really a shame that research organizations are now forced to fund themselves. They have no other choice other than to create commercially viable technologies in order to justify their existence.
Imagine a world where pure research organizations could pursue long term ideas, and give the results of their works for free to the public?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
You're misrepresenting the *substantial* difference between research and patent seeking. 'research' is open, it is all about sharing knowledge and promoting the free reuse of discoveries with no strings attached. 'patent seeking' is about closing off ideas and generating rent by artificially restricting the rest of the world's experimentation with similar ideas.
The fact is that the CSIRO is skirting the line, and that can put them very close to patent trolls.
For any true research organisation, that is, if its purpose for existing is research, then patents aren't needed. It's not like the employees do nothing all day, and one day someone hears that patents are worth money, and suddenly everybody does research so they can get the patents. Most university departments are true research organisations, and they *don't* seek patents.
It's true that patents can supplement income for a research organisation, but again, that's just *one* way of supplementing income and certainly shouldn't be the *main* one. There's grant money, consulting, teaching/seminars etc, even bake sales ;-), all of which don't bring the nasty evilness of patents into the world.
An organisation which only does research and seeks patents from that research exclusively to sell them is IMHO a patent troll. It's a classic case of homesteading the space of ideas for rent money. Just because maybe a "good guy" does it doesn't make it right.
What said organisation ought to be doing if it is going to patent an idea is launching a startup which owns the patent. For example, when Stanford got the patent for PageRank it was used to found a small company to exploit the idea and run with it. If Stanford had just sat on the patent without launching any startups based on it, I would call that patent trolling behaviour. And yes, sometimes Stanford does that too.
I find this article annoying as the poster is using this article to promote his point of view which is biased and misleading.
The CSIRO is a scientific research organization and as such it can in no way commercialize the technology.
I agree that it was sad that CSIRO have to take companies to court to defend their patents but if these these companies would play by the rules and license the technology then CSIRO would not have to resort to the flawed legal system.
The fact that you do not like the way it uses patents to fund research is neither here nor their it as it is using patent law for it's intended purpose which is different from a person or organization that uses patents purely for litigation.
I would ask the poster that if he is going to submit propaganda that at least he should be truthful and honest about what he is doing.
propaganda [prop-uh-gan-duh] Show IPA noun 1.information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc. ....
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/propaganda
Anyone who quotes Florian Mueller as if he were anything other than a shill at this stage of the game is full of it.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
When a research organization files a patent on non-trivial research they did, it's called "innovation", and when an organization which employes mostly lawyers files one on a fairly obvious thing it's called "trolling".
Prior to the CSIRO lawsuit, CSIRO actively attempted to license its wifi patents. See http://www.ipo.org/AM/TemplateRedirect.cfm?Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=4600
When the big multinationals refused to pay patent fees, CSIRO opted to defend its intellectual property rights. That's what the patent system is for. If defending intellectual property rights is considered trolling, then why have IP rights?
The point is that it's difficult to predict the relevance of a given technology. If you have a mandate to only explore "commercially viable" science, that means only exploring stuff that boring suits think might generate a bottom line. But people are terrible at predicting what will be useful and what won't.
Ultimately, yes, I agree, pie-in-the-sky science projects can irritate me, but making all science "commercially viable" is inevitably going to reduce the amount of science that actually produces results useful in the technical arts.
By a company called Radiata, bought by Cisco in 2000. Radiata was a spin off from a Macquarie University/CSIRO research collaboration, founded by the research leaders at Macquarie University (Skellern and Weste). Here's a picture of the MU/CSIRO protype, taken around 1996. I know this because I (and 3 others) designed and built the pictured prototype.
...but I couldn't see where I could mod the submission as "troll"?
The problem is that this overlooks one of the major problems with the current drive to patent all that can be patented, even when it was found as part of a government research project. As soon as there is a possibility to directly profit from research findings, it becomes more likely that research will be directed toward what will maximize the likelihood that something patentable will be found. This reduces the difference between what government and what the industry will focus on, which undermines the rationale for having government research in the first place (i.e. to fill in a gap and allow for "pie-in-the-sky" research that, although interesting for theoretical, basic science reasons, has no immediate applications). If the government ends up researching the same things as industry does because they want to be the first to patent it, launch a spin-off and get bought out by the industry, it might be easier to just subsidize the industry.
I have seen it happen at my own institution. Several departments have now all but abandoned basic research and focus on applied endeavors that would be best done by private companies. Mostly recycling well-known solutions with minor, incremental changes rather than trying any "bold" new research that might or might not work but has the potential to fundamentally enhance our understanding of the world.
It's quite a significant departure from the traditional role of government and universities in research and also restricts the diffusion of knowledge. If something has been funded by public money, it belongs to the taxpayer and should be freely available. This is one of the important roles of government, to release things into the commons so that it can be used freely. If, as an offshoot of basic research, interesting information is released and allows companies to improve their products at a low-cost, then the taxpayer benefits from that (especially since, with no patent, all companies have equal access to this innovation and cannot leverage the exclusivity to charge more), probably more than if universities join in the patent thicket and start suing companies on the basis that they "invented" such things as predictive text (University of Texas).
Patents might still be useful in pharma, where the costs of developing a new drug (even when the basic research has already been done by a university) are very high and the marginal of the drug is close to zero. But in most other fields, it's just a nuisance.
Perhaps government agencies should leave "business" to businesses.
Why? What would businesses do in the case of the Wi-Fi patents that would be different to (and better than) what the CSIRO is doing? It seems to me that how the CSIRO has handled the patent situation prove that they don't need to leave "business" to businesses; the government is doing quite well enough.
I think perhaps that your argument stems from ideological views rather than an objective analysis of the facts. The CSIRO Wi-Fi technology happened as a byproduct of their research into radio astronomy. Do you really think that businesses can be relied on to do all the work required for astronomy? Is there are big market for that sort of thing?
The reason to have something run by the government is because the profit based incentives of a business do not work in that area. Like you pointed out, private, for-profit utilities do a poor job. I see no good reason to run a government research organization like you would a private research organization. The sensible way to handle this would be to do the research and make it freely available. The funding would come from taxpayers, and if this research is truly fruitful, the public would have greater prosperity, and greater capabilities of funding further research. It also means that agencies like CSIRO can make research decisions based upon what is best for the public to research, as opposed to partially or wholly avoiding research that isn't patentable.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
maybe cos its a government research organisation, not a commercial company. maybe the difference is that many other government research orgs are quite happy to sink countless millions in taxpayer-funded grants into new tech that is merely ripped off by commercial companies, so that taxpayers get to pay for it twice-over.
Really?
First: lets set the record straight, they didn't invent wifi. It was working long before they got involved. They merely improved it, by applying state of the art backscatter minimization techniques already well known in the radar and UHF radio industry so that it could penetrate walls, and work in confined spaces.
CSIRO patented an idea. An algorithm. A mathematical formula for signal timing. Its exactly the same thing as MP3 patents, or the patents (expired) on GIF images. Had an american company done this, even a publicly funded one, you would have been all over them as patent trolls. But because its Australian it gets a pass?!!?
Second, instead of setting up a company or licensing others to set up companies to produce products they publicized their work, waited till it was widely adopted, then started suing people. They initially released it for open use, not expecting much. Even when the world+dog decided they wanted laptops they did nothing to license it. Only when it became ubiquitous did they jump in with lawyers.
If it was tax payer funded, it already belongs to the people.
People weren't paying for it TWICE until CSIRO decided to sue. So the very thing you condemn was brought about by the action you applaud.
Only when they started patent trolling did those licensing fees get passed on to the consumer to pay yet again for something they had funded and contributed to the community. Routers cost money to build.
Is CSIRO returning any monies to the Aussie Taxpayer? Is their government funding in any way reduced in light of their licensing revenue? Nope.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
NASA simply put men on the moon using technology invented during world war 2
everything seems simple in hindsight
they didn't invent wifi
i didn't claim they did invent wifi, but there are a lot of patents covering the technology that makes up wifi. no single company or organisation invented wifi. they did invent something that refined wifi, regardless of where it come from. all current invention is standing on the shoulders of those that came before them. most patents cover a relatively small level of innovation that is based on previous innovation. there are very few major breakthrough innovations nowadays (like invention of the light bulb or integrated circuit, but even these major breakthroughs required previous innovation to assist in understanding, such as electrical theory and invention of materials that made light bulbs and IC's possible)
Had an american company done this, even a publicly funded one, you would have been all over them as patent trolls
whatever your point here, an american company didn't invent it, and i'm not "all over" companies that patent algorithms like mp3 and gif either. you're starting to sound like a dipshit
instead of setting up a company or licensing others to set up companies to produce products they publicized their work, waited till it was widely adopted, then started suing people
try doing your homework first dipshit. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Scientific_and_Industrial_Research_Organisation#802.11_patent "In 1997 Macquarie University Professor David Skellern and his colleague Neil Weste established the company Radiata, Inc., which took a nonexclusive licence to the CSIRO patent for the purpose of developing commercially viable integrated circuit devices implementing the patented technology.". the patent was granted in 1996, so there was no "waiting until it was widely adopted". now you're just a fucking retard troll.
If it was tax payer funded, it already belongs to the people
wrong again fucktard. it belongs to the australian taxpayer, not leeching american corporate shareholders. the CSIRO doesn't work for american anything
Is CSIRO returning any monies to the Aussie Taxpayer?
less taxpayer money is going to CSIRO than would be necessary if there was no return on investment from patent licensing, so they are saving taxpayer monies
you really are just a wanker