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CSIRO Wireless Patent Reaffirmed In US Court

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Nov 15, 2006 04:52 PM
from the i-was-here-first-nyah-nyah dept.
Wireless Networking Government The Courts Hardware News
An anonymous reader writes ""The CSIRO has won a landmark US legal battle against Buffalo Technology, under which it could receive royalties from every producer of wireless local area network (WLAN) products worldwide." From the article: "The patent, granted to CSIRO in 1996, encompasses elements of the 802.11a/g wireless technology that is now an industry standard. It stems from a system developed by CSIRO in the early '90s, 'to exchange large amounts of information wirelessly at high speed, within environments such as offices and homes,' said a CSIRO spokeswoman."
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Your Rights Online: Buffalo Tech Gets New Trial On Wi-Fi Patent 78 comments
MrLint writes "It's been a long, nearly two years of silence since CSIRO won a patent battle against Buffalo Tech, causing an injunction preventing the Austin company from selling wireless routers. On September 19, 2008, a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that CSIRO patent claims are invalid and Buffalo is getting a new trial. With any luck, we will be able to get our grubby hands on low-cost Wi-Fi routers again!"
[+] Your Rights Online: CSIRO Wins Wi-Fi Settlement From HP 125 comments
suolumark writes "The CSIRO has won what could be a landmark settlement from Hewlett Packard over the use of patented wireless technology. The settlement ended HP's involvement in a four-year lawsuit brought by the CSIRO on a group of technology companies, in which the organisation was seeking royalties for wi-fi technology that is used extensively on laptops and computers worldwide. CSIRO spokesman Luw Morgan earlier said legal action was continuing against 13 companies: Intel, Dell, Toshiba, Asus, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton, 3-Com, Buffalo, Microsoft and Nintendo."
[+] Your Rights Online: CSIRO Settles With Tech Giants Over WiFi Patent Spat 92 comments
Combat Wombat brings news that the legal battle between the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO) and a host of major tech corporations has come to end, with a large settlement going to the CSIRO. The fight was over a patent on wireless LAN technology, which already earned the CSIRO a victory in court over Buffalo Technology and a settlement with Hewlett-Packard. The remaining 13 companies, which include Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Nintendo, have now chosen to settle as well. "[The CSIRO] will use the money won from a Wi-Fi technology patent battle to fund further research. ... It is unclear how much money has flowed to the CSIRO, but experts say the technology would be worth billions of dollars if royalties were paid on an ongoing basis."
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CSIRO Wireless Patent Reaffirmed In US Court 50 Comments More /

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  • Hm (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tarlus (1000874) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @04:54PM (#16859810)
    Well, as long as I can continue to surf the internet while on the john, I really don't care who owns the wireless patent.

  • sucks to be them... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by aztracker1 (702135) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @04:54PM (#16859814) Homepage
    Honestly, if anything will scream for patent reform, it's when the cities with municipal wi-fi start getting sued...

    • Re:sucks to be them... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lightyear4 (852813) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @04:58PM (#16859902) Homepage
      why would those utilizing the technology be sued? surely the manufacturers of such equipment are those most directly affected?
      • Ask Darl McBride....

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Waffle Iron (339739)

        why would those utilizing the technology be sued?

        Because rightly or wrongly, a patent grants exclusive rights to make, sell or use an invention. The end users are infringing on the patent by using the technology, and unless they got explicit indemnification from the manufacturer, they can be sued.

        The main reason that they probably won't get sued is because it's simply easier to extract a lot of money from a few manufacturers than tiny amounts of money from each of millions of users.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by QuantumG (50515)
          Well, technically, a patent gives you the exclusive right to stop others from practicing the invention.

          It's not just a semantic quibble I'm making here, the difference is that the patent holder has to actively enforce their patent, and typically that is not an economically feasible thing to do against infringers who don't have deep pockets.

  • Who to the what, now? (Score:5, Informative)

    by RobertB-DC (622190) * on Wednesday November 15 2006, @04:54PM (#16859816) Homepage Journal
    Something that might have been helpful to include in the story submission:
    *Note for International media: CSIRO is the national research agency of the Australian Government. It undertakes scientific research for the purpose of assisting Australian industry, furthering the interests of the Australian community and contributing to the achievement of national objectives.

    (Source: a previous press release [csiro.au] about the case)

    • Re:Who to the what, now? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Sponge Bath (413667) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:40PM (#16860662)

      ...agency of the Australian Government

      Goodness. A dingo ate my wifi!

      Yes, I learned everything I know about Australia from Slashdot, Fosters commercials,
      and Crocodile Dundee movies.

      • What part of Australian industry, Australian economy and Australian national interests did you miss there? The CSIRO should be using this patent, and any other patents they have, to lock non-Australian companies out of this market. I think the real shame is the fact that it has taken them 10 years to do anything. But, hey, 10 years from lab to market, that's standard.
  • How can they collect royalties from Buffalo for every wireless device sold in the world? Does buffalo technology own the patent for that? Wouldn't that mean that companies like Netgear would have to pay them to manufacture wireless gear? I thought that the 802.11 standard was just that, not a patent.

    • Re:Say What? (Score:5, Informative)

      by StArSkY (128453) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:01PM (#16859938) Homepage
      it's called precedent. By winning this one, every other company will pay rather than fight, because the judges will refer to the buffalo case.

      • it's called precedent. By winning this one, every other company will pay rather than fight, because the judges will refer to the buffalo case.

        Precedents only cover the actual jurisdiction of the issuing court. And add that Common Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law [wikipedia.org] is not the predominant system of law in the world, Civil Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_syst em) [wikipedia.org] is. And Civil Law places a lot less weight on precedents than Common Law.

        • true, but to get royalties from an american company, one only needs to sue in america yes?

          • true, but to get royalties from an american company, one only needs to sue in america yes?

            From the article, though it wasn't layed out very clearly, it appears they are doing this as a counter-suit: the other US based companies filed to invalidate the patents in question, CSIRO tried filing that they were immune to the US lawsuit since they are a foreign governmental body, judge dismissed their claim and allowed the invalidation claims to proceed, so CSIRO filed counter-suit for patent infringement.

            tm

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by StArSkY (128453)
              the bigger picture

              CSIRO has been "negotiating" licences for the patents with LOTS of copmnanies, including buffalo, dell, microsoft, HP, netgear etc etc etc.

              Buffalo file for invalidation
              CSIRO claimed immunity (worth a shot, but obviously failed)
              then counter-sue for unpaid royalties.

              So it sounds more complicated than it is. The counter-suit is the logical response to an invalidation suit.

              and yeah, plenty of US companies to sue. don't have to worry about the rest of the world if you can sue them all in the U

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by TekPolitik (147802)

          Precedents only cover the actual jurisdiction of the issuing court.

          More to the point, precedents only cover questions of law - it does not cover questions of fact. As between Buffalo and the CSIRO the answers to the questions of fact are set in stone (subject to any appeal) not because of precedent, but because of the principles of res judicata and issue estoppel. As between anybody else (who is not claiming some rights through Buffalo) and the CSIRO, there is nothing to prevent a court from reaching ent

          • Well made point and clarifying. I was just pointing out the most obvious differences in worldwide jurisdictions.

    • Re:Say What? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tmack (593755) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:05PM (#16860022) Homepage Journal
      How can they collect royalties from Buffalo for every wireless device sold in the world? Does buffalo technology own the patent for that? Wouldn't that mean that companies like Netgear blah blah blah

      RTFA... to answer all your questions, YES. They (CSIRO) own the patent, which evidently covers technology that lead to the standard and would mean royalties from most wireless (802.11a/g) devices worldwide, and they are going after the others (Netgear was specifically mentioned) as well...seriously, RTFA!

      tm

  • CSIRO Patents are a good thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:03PM (#16859976)
    I really think that having the CSIRO earning money for every WLAN access point is a reason why the patent system is a Good Thing (tm). Not greedy corporations making money, just an honest government research institute getting credit for their work.

    Just look at their research on the new Air Guitar for example

  • If the CSIRO had any balls.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:07PM (#16860064) Homepage Journal
    they would use this finding to stop the manufacture of all infringing devices in the world, except the ones that are made in Australia. Seeing as the charter of the CSIRO is to produce research which exclusively benefits Australian business, that's what they should be doing.
    • Before the end of the 1940s CSIRO's predecessor developed and test ran the world's "fifth electronic stored program computer", later known as CSIRAC [unimelb.edu.au]. In 1954 widely venerated Prime Minister Robert Menzies decided that CSIRO should drop research on computers in favour of cloud seeding. (The back stories would fill a book without getting to Pig Iron Bob presenting my undergraduate degree.)

      Then in the early 1980s microprocessor technology faciliated the emergence of a promising embryonic computer hardware indu

    • Re:If the CSIRO had any balls.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Petra_von_Kant (825352) <petra_von_kant@mac.com> on Wednesday November 15 2006, @07:27PM (#16862312)
      As an ex-CSIRO scientist from the early 1990's who personally developed several diagnostic assays for chlamydia trachomatis (look it up) which were commissioned by a certain large Swedish pharmaceutical company, I can confidently say, that the work done wasn't solely for the benefit of Australian companies.

      For some years, the CSIRO has had a policy of being a hired gun, so to speak, for anyone prepared to hand over the readies, and further, applies pressure to the various divisions, to be self-funding to a certain degree (in my particular group, it was 30% but that was 12 years ago now).

      The current Australian goverment, is, unfortunately, a conservative one, and is only too happy to put pressure on the CSIRO and other research institutes to get their funding from elsewhere, rather than from the public purse (well, gives them more money to piss up against the wall for defence et cetera).

      10 years, however, is about par for the course with anything at the CSIRO, as it is now top heavy with administrators whose sole aim in life is to ensure that their arses are protected. The truly great and good scientists from there have all buggered orf or taken their generous redundany pay and retired. Me? I was headhunted over 10 years ago and I don't really miss it the way it is now.

      Rather I yearn for the days before some idiot decided that bean counters or people with an MBA should be in charge, where you didn't have to attend 5 meetings a day or spend time worrying about your ever shrinking contract and were allowed to get on with the genuine science.

      OK, spleen vented ..........
      • I think our US friends might disagree with the notion that population count is a determination of the importance of a country.

        Regardless of your particular nationalist preference, the CSIRO exists to invent stuff, aid in the commercialisation of that stuff by Australian industry and use whatever legal protections are available to prevent non-Australian industry from doing the same. What happens to the Australian businesses once they have been established is a different matter altogether. Typically, Austra

  • Looks like a legit patent.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kenja (541830) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:14PM (#16860186)
    http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5487069.html [freepatentsonline.com]
    http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5487069.pdf [freepatentsonline.com]

    Its more or less a means of generating multi pathed radio signals with CRC checking from packet data. So long as they're not greedy with the royalties, more power to em.

    • Re:Looks like a legit patent.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RingDev (879105) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:30PM (#16860460) Homepage Journal
      Thanks for the links. My fear initially was that this was just another craptastic submarine patent.

      But here's a question. 802.11a has been a standard a long time, in development long before its acceptance. Why is it that the patents that apply to the technology that this standard is based off just NOW coming to light? Why were patent/royalty issue not brought up in 1999 or earlier?

      It seems kind of shady to me to wait until after the standard was released (1999), after wide spread US adoption (2001), after world wide adoption (2003), until years later when the technology is so prolific that companies that have based their entire success on the technologies covered by the patents have no option to change to a non-infringing technology. Or has this been a 7+ year long court case?

      -Rick
      • It seems kind of shady to me to wait until after the standard was released ...

        Pretty much the definition of a submarine patent: sit on it until there's money to be made.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by sk0pe (614508)
          Uhh, yeah. You're ignoring the fact that this suit is a COUNTER-suit. They're suing Buffalo to prevent the patent being rule invalid. Sounds like CSIRO were happy to continue as things were until the manufacturers decided to apply for an invalidation of the patent.

      • Re:Looks like a legit patent.... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Kyro (302315) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @07:08PM (#16862032)
        From what I can remember (no source sorry) the reason it took so long was because until the US-Australia FTA was signed 2 years ago or whatever, there was no reason for Intel/Buffalo etc to be worried about getting sued.

        When the FTA was signed, they realised they could get sued so they went to court to invalidate the patent and CSIRO counter-claimed.

        Something along those grounds anyway.

      • Maybe not just coming to light now (Score:4, Informative)

        by Chuck Chunder (21021) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @10:26PM (#16863954) Homepage Journal
        According to CSIRO they have been selling licences [csiro.au] to companies it's just an issue now because it's now that this "Buffalo Technology" company has decided it doesn't want to pay.
    • WTF... Does not compute...

      1. What does this have to do with a 2.4GHz band (it refers to 10GHz+)?
      2. This is very close to a technique which is heavily used in CDMA. Wireless makes little use of it, while CDMA explicitly uses multipath for signal quality improvement. So if this patent is what I think it is they should be suing Nokia, Quallcomm, Samsung and the lot. Not Buffallo.
      • Buffalo is an easy first target.

        Now they can go after the big boys and expect high seimans.... hehe, little EE joke in there somewhere ...

  • CSIRO Rocks! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jdigital (84195) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:31PM (#16860468) Homepage
    Don't knock the CSIRO. At one of their 'Double Helix' club meetings I learned how to program my calculator to generate a Mandelbrot set. Might not be so much of a feat to you TI fanboys, but this was on an HP-42S (which I still own & use) - a non-graphing calculator.

    Later I was placed in a summer program where I learned matlab whilst working at a steel testing lab.

    Cool stuffs.

  • Patent and standards (Score:4, Insightful)

    by microbee (682094) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:34PM (#16860552)
    A technology will have a very hard time being standardized if someone holds the patent. However, in this case and others, nobody realized the patent issue when it was being pushed as a standard. Many years later, when everyone is using it, the patent holder comes out and claims the ownership and starts to collect payments. It's too late to correct the mistake. If the patent holder had been saying so from the beginning, it would not have had a chance to grow such a market value.

    I think there should be some laws to restrict such a practice.

    • Re:Patent and standards (Score:4, Informative)

      by Shanep (68243) on Thursday November 16 2006, @12:03AM (#16864722) Homepage
      A technology will have a very hard time being standardized if someone holds the patent. However, in this case and others, nobody realized the patent issue when it was being pushed as a standard. Many years later, when everyone is using it, the patent holder comes out and claims the ownership and starts to collect payments. It's too late to correct the mistake. If the patent holder had been saying so from the beginning, it would not have had a chance to grow such a market value.

      I think there should be some laws to restrict such a practice.

      That is not what happened in this case. The patent holder was "holding back" in this case because they had no option. It was an Australian patent against a US corporation. Now that the FTA is in force, this has opened the opportunity not only for the Australian patent holder to enforce their patent in the US, but also for the US corporation to challenge the Australian patent in court. Guess what? The greedy US corportation challenged the CSIRO, an honorable scientific research entity, in court to have their patent invalidated. So naturally, as is required to retain a patent, the CSIRO had to defend their patent to keep it.

      The CSIRO [csiro.au] are good people. They do lots of good things [csiro.au] for the good of not just Australia, but the World.

      This court case was brought against them, the CSIRO, in an attempt to invalidate their rightful patent. If you do not defend your patent, you lose it.

      So here we have a case where a money motivated corporation is trying to stomp on a scientific research entity (which only strives to further the state of the art), so that the corportation can make more money. Thankfully the scientific research entity came out on top.

      There is patent abuse in this story, but it most certainly is NOT from the CSIRO. Thankfully that abuse failed.

  • Hey! That's mine. (Score:3, Funny)

    by mhokie (988228) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:36PM (#16860594)
    '""The CSIRO has won...'
    Incorrectly starting quotes with two (2) quotation marks has been patented by me! I'd like my $0.15 in royalties please.
  • In the long run isnt this going to prove bad for CSIRO? In the future as other "standards" are adopted will anyone want the CSIRO involved and will any of their achievements be looked at as something to include rather than something to avoid? While I understand their reasoning I really think this was very shortsighted and could easily push the CSIRO into the relm of being virtually ignored by much of that standards community. I sat in on IEEE meetings for the 802.11g standard and saw shocked to learn the

  • 10 years too long (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nrlightfoot (607666) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:53PM (#16860892) Homepage
    Considering the rate of innovation these days, a 20 year patent period is far too long. A good first step for patent reform would be to reduce the length of patents by half or more.

  • Not over yet... (Score:3, Informative)

    by kansas1051 (720008) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @05:57PM (#16860972)
    Although this is certainly a big victory for CSIRO, the battle over this patent is far from over. Almost all "big" patent suits are appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which is the appellate court that has jurisdiction over patent appeals. The Federal Circuit reverses district court decisions (like the decision mentioned in the story) about 60% of the time. It also takes several years to move through the appellate process, which means it will be quite some time before Buffalo pays a cent to CSIRO.

  • Tax relief for Australians (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2006, @07:01PM (#16861928)
    Basically all countries of the world will be assisting Australians pay their taxation bill and that works for me.

    Capitalism at its best. Thank you all very much...

    A Happy Aussie

  • "802.11a/g" (Score:3, Funny)

    by Quantam (870027) on Wednesday November 15 2006, @08:56PM (#16863208) Homepage
    It's Australian for "OWNED"
    • RTFP. Read the f-ing patent. This is hardly a submarine patent, they go into great detail about to to design an implement such a system.

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