The Story Behind Australia's CSIRO Wi-Fi Claims 161
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.'"
Absolute crap article (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Holy Flamebait Batman! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
IEEE was aware of the patent (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Absolute crap article (Score:5, Informative)
We have been reading about this for the last ten years.
article glosses over a few things (Score:3, Informative)
the CSIRO had found a technique to heavily inteference and transmission of wireless signals
at the same time consortiums threw significantly more money at the problem couldn't come up with a better solution
yes, IEEE started the standards process before the patent was filed
unlike most patent filings today, CSIRO had already developed the hardware
also unlike today, you don't have to file a patent the second you come up with an idea
after years of tech consortiums failing at an alternative, IEEE asked for use of the "patent"
CSIRO agreed to it becoming part of the standard on the basis of receiving royalties
(just like any other corporation or patent holder would demanded)
the problem being CSIRO never got any royalties
the article "writer" expected the CSIRO, after years of companies not honouring their agreement, to simply roll-over and bugger off
but who's at fault here? the CSIRO for asking for what they were told they'd get, or the companies using the patrent for free?
from what i can tell, the companies were hoping to play the waiting game
thinking the next iteration of wireless tech could work without the patent
so if you wait long enough, you can profit all you need from it's use, then expect a small payout years (decades?) later when the patent is superceded
unfortunately for the companies, the patent still applies today as it did when the standard was formed
also, the writer upfront says the CSIRO sued for $4 per device
he makes no mention of how much the original royalty was for
which if the companies paid it in the first place, they would be making this "donation"
i mean ffs. the writer says CSIRO is commonly called "si-roh"
it's never been called that outside of small pocket of idiots thinking CSIRO is a word rather than an acronym
so either Joe Mullin got trolled hard by certain "fact" presented to him, or he was lazy and didn't do research
overall i'd put this to the public:
would you rather pay your "donation" to government research organisation, or to a technology corporation?
Re:Independant Discovery (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Holy Flamebait Batman! (Score:5, Informative)
Pity that 'someone else' tried to, failed, and instead agreed to license the CSIRO technology under royalty agreements, then reneged and failed to pay royalties. Now they have to follow through with that agreement and pay what they were due.
Re:Holy Flamebait Batman! (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. The technology in question was adopted for 802.11a and g. The Ars article is flamebait.
Re:Sometimes I wonder (Score:2, Informative)
I know the guy - he works in an office down the hall from my PhD supervisor. He's currently working on phased array feeds for the new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder [wikipedia.org] telescope, which let it see 30x as much of the sky at once as a conventional radio telescope. I don't know what fraction of these feeds was his idea, but I assume it was significant. If we're really lucky, perhaps the technology they develop will turn out to be as useful as that mentioned in the fine article.
Re:Holy Flamebait Batman! (Score:3, Informative)
CSIRO's patent is a combination of technologies which weren't put together on a chip already due to technical problems with putting them together on a chip. CSIRO didn't manage to figure out a way to do it either. And, as far as I'm aware, their contention is that nobody took their royalty requests seriously. There was no "reneging" on an agreement to pay royalties. They took these companies to court specifically because they denied the validity of the patent.
It's sort of like saying "Mix A, B, and C together without blowing it up" will fix problem Z. That's all well and good if you, yourself, patent a non-obvious method for doing so when nobody else can figure it out. However, in this case it seems they patented the recipe "Mix A, B, C" without being able to themselves, not a process that actually worked. The problem seemed to be that the recipe was obvious to everyone, but nobody had figured out how to put it together successfully (again, CSIRO didn't either). So, once others figured out how to finally get these elements working together they sued because it used the recipe of ingredients that were obvious to everyone from the get-go would eventually be used in some form or other.
I could be off-base about the above assumptions, but they are what I've gathered from reading the various articles I could find actually discussing the patents technically and from reading the patent description itself. I'm not a radiophysicist/engineer, so I could be missing something which would be obvious to one.
What's novel in the patent? (Score:5, Informative)
I only briefly looked at the patent, and it looks like it's simply the application of OFDM [wikipedia.org] to wireless communication between computers. OFDM, for those who aren't very familiar, is a way to deal with linear time invariant systems that can corrupt the data. For example, you can consider the signal going from one antenna to the other as going through such a system. Since these types of systems will only modify the amplitude and phase of each frequency band separately, instead of mixing them together as would be the case in the time domain, you encode the information you want to send as specific frequencies. For example, if you send out a wireless signal and it echoes all over the place, the time domain signal gets all mixed up and "slushy". However, if you perform a Fourier transform on the input signal and the output signal, you'll notice that the echoing only caused frequency bands to individually get attenuated/magnified and/or shifted in phase, but none of the frequency bands has mixed together. OFDM exploits this property to provide for robust communication (well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general gist of it). However, it sounds like this patent is simply saying "hey, OFDM is good for wireless communication", which feels kind of obvious to me considering the point of OFDM.
This article should be tagged "troll" (Score:2, Informative)
Slashdot is increasingly becoming a platform for conspiracy theorists and political agendas; Maybe it's time for slashdot to post a story on the increase in shameless bias in slashdot articles?
Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
You should have read the article before posting. I'll help you out by simplifying it. Basically all of the technology CSIRO used is not just old, but decades old. They claim that they put it all together, but a working device built in the 80's was demonstrated at the hearing in east texas... in east texas where no one stands a chance.. the compainies in question decided to cut a deal before any verdict was given.. but really CSIRO looks very, very much like the kind of techtard patent troll that makes most people wonder what the patent system is really for...
Just read the article..