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Corruption Allegations Rock Australia's CSIRO
An anonymous reader writes "Australia's premiere government research organization, the CSIRO, has been rocked by allegations of corruption including: dishonesty with 60 top-class scientists bullied or fired, fraud against drug giant Novartis, and illegally using intellectual property, faking documents and unreliable testimony to judicial officers. CSIRO boss Megan Clark has refused to discipline the staff responsible and the federal police don't want to get involved. Victims are unimpressed and former CSIRO scientists are calling for an inquiry."
DIdn't they claim to have invented a particular (and difficult) aspect of recovering a clean signal from a noisy environment? (the noise being largely additional reflections of the initial signal). I believe the general consensus was that this was patent-worthy and worthy of recompense.
You don't have to do a lot of research to find get the real story rather than just relaying some of the overzealous misinformation that has gone on about this. They never said that they invented 802.11 WiFi, merely that it used some of their patented technology.
And unlike patent trolls who use submarine patents, the CSIRO and the IEEE actually discussed the use of the patent prior to its inclusion in the standard, at which time the CSIRO said they would make non-exclusive licenses available to implementers of the standard on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
CSIRO talks out of two sides of its mouth. It wants to take credit for Wi-Fi.
Is it that they want to take credit, or do other people keep giving them credit. By the same token you could say that they want to be called a patent troll just because some people call them that!
And no, CSIRO did not discuss with IEEE the use of the patent prior to its inclusion in the standard. The standard was published in 1997 and CSIRO didn't pipe up until later. They were not even on the 802.11 committee. This is standard submarine trolling.
The CSIRO patent was first used with 802.11a, which was published in 1999. The '97 standard could only do a rather slow 2Mbit/s, a flaw that the patent helped fix. And they did discuss it with CSIRO prior to its release. From the Wikipedia entry that I cited:
In 1998 it became apparent that the CSIRO patent would be pertinent to the standard. In response to a request from Victor Hayes of Lucent Technologies, who was Chair of the 802.11 Working Group, CSIRO confirmed its commitment to make non-exclusive licenses available to implementers of the standard on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
Cooper, Dennis (4 December 1998). "Letter to Mr V Hayes, Chair, IEEE P802.11" (PDF). Retrieved 13 May 2012.
That letter is located on the IEEE website, and it confirms the date that appears on the scanned letter. And further to that, they had also built their own chip that implemented their technology (and went around trying to sell it to various companies), so that makes them even less like a patent troll, who usually don't have any way of implementing their own patents.
And their FRAND terms? They wanted $4 per device.
Which, as they said, was an opening offer and not one that they ever expected. Every time companies negotiate a figure they start high; that is pretty much a standard tactic.