Wi-Fi Patent Victory Earns CSIRO $200 Million 267
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports the patent battle between Australia's CSIRO and 14 of the world's largest technology companies has gained the research organization $200 million from out of court settlements. CSIRO executive director of commercial, Nigel Poole, said the CSIRO were wanting to license their technology further, stating that he 'urged' companies using it to come forward and seek a license. 'We believe that there are many more companies that are using CSIRO's technology and it's our desire to license the technology further,' Poole said.'We would urge companies that are currently selling devices that have 802.11 a,g or n to contact CSIRO and to seek a license because we believe they are using our technology.'"
Only fair (Score:4, Informative)
Pat on the back for CSIRO. One of the ways government-owned research organizations can expect to survive is by monetizing inventions - when companies like Lucent, Buffalo, Linksys, Apple etc. all make a killing off this stuff and didn't invest in its development it is only fair they are forced to pay up.
CSIRO now in budget surplus (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Patent trolls (Score:5, Informative)
Except that they aren't patent trolls - they are the Australian Government's science organisation - Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), they have been in this battle for quite a while.
Read up on the WLAN stuff here http://www.csiro.gov.au/science/wireless-LANs.html [csiro.gov.au]
Then get back to us when you think that inventing wireless networking technology is easy and doesn't warrant the possibility of being patented.
Speaking of trolls (Score:3, Informative)
Isn't this an indication that the system is severely flawed when someone pops up very late to the table and claims that they own it?
[...] Softwares and methods are too easy to re-invent all over again, and who can tell if a certain solution has been available before and then silently put to the grave for one reason or another?
Speaking of trolls, you are one yourself. Before you mod me into oblivion, hear me out.
In your post, you seem to claim that (1) CSIRO is a patent troll; and that (2) the patent is a software patent, thus is unethical. Both claims are patently false. (ha ha)
For starters, to address claim (1), CSIRO is not a patent troll. What is a patent troll? A patent troll is an organisation that exists only to accumulate patents (and make a profit off royalties). CSIRO is not a patent troll! They are an Australian Government-funded organisation that does real research. They actually researched and patented the technology back in the early '90s. (Source) [abc.net.au]
To address claim (2), the patent in question is not a software patent! Thus the entire basis for your argument...
Softwares and methods are too easy to re-invent all over again, and who can tell if a certain solution has been available before and then silently put to the grave for one reason or another?
...is completely baseless. The patent in question covers the duplication and redundancy of radio waves, so it is obviously not a software patent. Basically the patent covers the way modern WiFi works, in that instead of serial (just one radio wave with error correction), parallel and redundant streams are sent, which allows you to have much greater bandwidth without losing the reliability. (And yes, that source again) [abc.net.au]
Re:Desire to license (Score:5, Informative)
Cisco aren't on the list because they already have a licence for the tech for which they pay royalties.
Re:Only fair (Score:5, Informative)
in spite of having their funding savaged? (Score:5, Informative)
Er, according to this article [news.com.au]:
What "savaging" are you talking about?
Re:Only fair (Score:3, Informative)
I believe it's Australian. Why should anyone who isn't Australian have the right to use that patent without paying the license?
(I pretty much agree with your basic argument, but not with the details. If the Australian's paid for it with taxes, then there's a good argument that they should be able to use it without paying patent license fees. This argument, however, doesn't work for someone living in, e.g., the US though.)
A different argument would assert that this entire class of things shouldn't be patentable. I'd be hospitable to that kind of an argument, but "the devil is in the details". I *don't* think the same work should be covered by any two of patent, copyright, DRM. Saying that no patents should be valid, however, is a bit further than I'm willing to go without further evidence. (I *would* go so far as to say, for the US, all patent laws should be thrown out, all extant patents should be invalidated, and the patent system should be recreated from scratch, with no monopoly granted by the patent. Some other mechanism is needed to reward inventors. A royalty seems reasonable, but I can't figure out how to justly set the worth of an invention for such a royalty.)
Re:Only fair (Score:1, Informative)
Everybody? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only fair (Score:3, Informative)
....................
Right; It's totally unfair. After so many things were invented by Australians which everyone else benefits from. The motor car; the transistor; the windmill; money; even the wheel. It's time the Australian tax payer got their fair pay back for being the main driver of invention in the world.
I know your being sarcastic but ...
PAYUP as an australian tax payer I would like to
get my money back for
"Black Box" flight recorder .......
Aircraft Navigation (DME)
Penicillin (production in commercial amounts)
Cochlear implant
Contact lenses (long wearing)
Anthrax Vaccine
Heart Pacemaker
Relenza (flu medication)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_measuring_equipment [wikipedia.org]
http://www.questacon.edu.au/indepth/clever/100_years_of_innovations.html [questacon.edu.au]
Re:can you explain? (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2708730.htm [abc.net.au]
If you're lucky, this might work in your region.
Re:Only fair (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Walter_Florey [wikipedia.org]
Re:can you explain? (Score:4, Informative)
I can name two "traditional" inventions in the 19th Century (just off the top of my head) that had nearly identical patent applications that arrived within a day or two to the USPTO:
Yeah, I'd say that simultaneous patent applications are a serious problem, and patent law doesn't really deal with research efforts where obvious areas of research are looked at by multiple individuals.
At least in terms of copyright, if two authors come up with similar topics and submit the books to the library of congress at nearly the same time, all that happens is that the books get classified with the same catalog number (mostly) putting them on the shelf next to each other. The copyright is completely in force for both books (presuming one author didn't plagiarize the other in a blatant manner).
Re:can you explain? (Score:4, Informative)
Given the current copyright and patent shenanigans that are in-play, I'd rather take my chances with no such system in place. How am I supposed to benefit from an inventor's time-limited monopoly if it doesn't expire until after my death? I am supposed to benefit from this deal, right?
Re:can you explain? (Score:3, Informative)
Garbage. If someoene can't be bothered to check whether something already exists before inventing it, then he's a fool.
1. Most lawyers will tell you absolutely not to do a patent check because there can be serious legal repercussions to doing so.
2. How do you propose finding out whether something has already been patented? There are a *lot* of patent applications, sifting through them to discover whether or not your invention (or a component thereof) has already been patented would be prohibitively costly for all but the largest of organisations.
3. At where do you draw the line? Are you going to go through the time and expense of (2) for every little trivial idea you come up with? There are a huge number of patents for stuff so trivial and obvious that most reasonable people wouldn't expect to be patentable.
4. Assuming that you actually mean "exists" rather than "is patented", how do you propose determining absolutely whether something unpatented exists? This is orders of magnitude more costly and less reliable than the already infeasible task of searching patent applications.
Re:can you explain? (Score:3, Informative)
First of all: people? So all of a sudden everybody is an inventor?
Not everyone, but a high proportion of the professional population are.
inventor is an occupation
Not really. Pretty much anyone working in a creative technical field will be "inventing" on pretty much a daily basis. Many (but not all) of these "inventions" are fairly trivial, but still patentable. We're talking about things like electronic circuits, microcontroller designs, etc. I.e. the stuff that "normal people" in the technical fields do *all the time*. Software developers are also coming up with new ideas pretty much all the time - if they aren't then they're a pretty crap software developer, and with the advent of software patents many of these "inventions" are patentable too.
So given this, to suggest that someone must perform a patent search (which will take weeks and almost certainly won't have 100% coverage) every time they come up with a new invention (every few days) is insane.
let's not forget that if you're inventing a kitchen appliance, you only need to research about existing kitchen appliances, you can skip anything else
Untrue. If you're inventing a kitchen appliance, you need to research other kitchen appliances, then you need to research all the technologies that go into your kitchen appliance. This could include patents on electronics, patents on various mechanical designs used within the appliance, etc. You may not consider the tiny low-level implementation details to be especially novel but that doesn't mean that someone else didn't, and if they did you open yourself up to getting sued.
Re:can you explain? (Score:1, Informative)
Definitely an invention. A number of research teams (not Australian) involved in telecommunications had been trying and failing to solve the wifi problem at the time the CSIRO team made their breakthrough. Interestingly the CSIRO team was not initially trying to create wifi as such, they were trying to solve a problem in data analysis for radio astronomy.
More info if you care at:
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2708730.htm