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Aussie Wi-Fi Patent Nears Expiry In the United States
Bismillah writes "Australia's national science and research agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization or CSIRO, has netted hundreds of millions on developing the near-ubiquitous Wi-Fi technology — and patenting it. Now however the patent is about to expire in the United States and eighteen other markets and the question is, can CSIRO come up with anything similarly successful in the future?"
You mean a couple of enterprising managers/scientists didn't immediately spin themselves off into a new company so they could personally collect the profits rather than give back to the universities and public sector research bodies which gave them education, experience, equipment, salary, thousands of articles upon which to base their research, and an almost infinite number of grad students, like with almost all groundbreaking modern research?
Have they really only made $430 million? If I were them, I'd look back and wonder where the royalty negotiations went wrong... That seems like a low number for something that is quite literally everywhere.
"expected to be in more than five billion devices by the time the patent expires."
~$0.08 per device for one of the most significant and widely known technologies in use today, someone got a good deal, wasn't the Aussies
Not sure where the derogatory tone is coming from, but this isn't a patent troll - they do actually have a patent on something that's useful and ubiquitous.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/06/01/2258221/csiro-sues-us-carriers-over-wi-fi-patent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSIRO#802.11_patent
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/10/csiro_patent_trolls_wifi/
As someone said in the last slashdot thread, all patent trolls may ask for money for patents they hold, but not all patent holders are patent trolls. As with many,many previous articles on this, it somehow seems to be framed in a "US versus them" argument to help fan the flames of jingoistic controversy.
Given the headlines and summaries this morning I think samzenpus is coming down off a three-day bender.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Yes, I like the section in this article which talks about how old and common the tech in the CSIRO patent is;
"All of the elements of the "unique combination" CSIRO proffered in court as a breakthrough weren't merely old by tech standards, they were decades old. "Multicarrier modulation," used in WiFi as OFDM, was described as early as the 1950s. Papers had been published on interleaving in the 1960s. Forward error correction, Intel's lawyer told the Texas jury, "was used when NASA sent the Mariner mission to Mars in 1968." Harris Semiconductor had actual working products incorporating these techniques by the 1980s and the company was selling its modems to the US military. The lead defense attorney for Intel, Robert Van Nest, even showed one of those Harris modems to the Texas jury during the 2009 case.
"This Harris modem wasn't patented," Van Nest explained. "Of course not. Nobody thought this was a real invention, because interleaving, modulation, and coding had been around for 30 years by the time Harris came up with this." The issue was making great wireless products, Van Nest explained. "The problem wasn't putting these radio technologies together. Everybody had that... The problem was, how do you take something like the Harris modem and turn it into a chip that I can hold in my hand? That's a problem that the CSIRO patent doesn't even address."
Oh no... it's the future.
WiFi is the result of a standardisation process in which many people and organisations contributed technology.
Yes, but not the CSIRO; from all evidence, it was an example of convergent evolution, much like calculus - both the IEEE and CSIRO came to the same conclusions as regarding the best way of handling indoor interference, its just that CSIRO did it first, and patented it. Then the IEEE produced their standard without checking for patents, and unknowingly incorporated patented technology in it.
My understanding is that the CSIRO patent and general claim that Australia "invented wifi" is perceived as nonsense, and CSIRO is seen as little better than a patent troll.
That "understanding" seems to derive from sour grapes over the fact that some other country is exploiting the patent system the US has forced on the rest of the world. Personally, I think that the fact that an entirely unrelated entity managed to duplicate the patent without relying in CSIRO's knowledge should be proof of it not being sufficiently non-obvious - but there are thousands of US patents that I have to pay for that would be invalidated by that same standard, so the US can just suck it up. The game is stupid, but it was them who wrote the rules.
Also, CSIRO has been around since 1926, long before the IEEE even existed, and is responsible for a vast amount of scientific research. Calling them a patent troll is like calling Bell Labs a patent troll.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
While US copyright duration has been extended many times, I'm not aware of a similar trend for patents.
It was extended from 17 to 20 years for "international conformance", but that's the only one I know of.
As noted by MrNemesis, the Ars Technica piece was, as so much journalism unfortunately is these days, written to push a specific "us vs them" mentality; this ultimately resulted in the author compromising their integrity to try and hammer a dubious point home in a concrete manner. A look at the Wikipedia article about the CSIRO patent notes the author had a follow-up article with more dubious attempts to validate their point; he quotes an unrelated and apparently uninformed politican saying Australia invented WiFi - it did not - as evidence of CSIRO claiming it did, and making the unusual assertation that because CSIRO itself wasn't directly involved in the creation of the WiFi standard its patent claim is invalid, even though a company that was licensing CSIRO's patent actively used it as part of their participation in the creation of the WiFi standard. The Register also covers the interesting points.
I'm an Australian and I think CSIRO is an awesome organisation that's earned considerable respect, and I'm not overly fond of the US media's attempts to smear it in order to improve their bottom line (in Ars' case, ad impressions from indignant people on both sides of the fence).
It's easy to jump on a bandwagon, but you should figure out where it came from and where it's going before you do.
The U.S. patent term was "extended" from 17 years after grant to 20 years after filing when it takes 3 years to process a patent application anyway.
IEEE and CSIRO weren't independent, as the IEEE standard was derived from CSIRO's work. Via their proxy, Macquarie University, CSIRO were in the standards meetings making technical contributions and being upfront about patents and the need to pay a reasonable royalty. The big players ignored the request for royalties, guessing CSIRO wouldn't be up to the fight. They were wrong.
The version of events you're describing didn't happen. There was no "convergent evolution". CSIRO spin-off Radiata was involved in creating the standard. See the Register article. There's a license letter proving the IEEE was fully aware of CSIRO patent and its impact on the 802.11a standard. If you look at the letters of assurance list, there was a long list of such agreements hammered out as part of the standardization process. Given all that, the idea that CSIRO's technology was obvious and easily duplicated isn't true either, so your US patent system flamebait is unsupported by this example. The only part you got right here is that CSIRO's role as a research lab that spins off commercial products does not make them a patent troll.