Register – Friday 21st September 2007:
The IEEE working group developing the 802.11n Wi-Fi is holding urgent meetings this week to discuss a significant threat to the standard from patents held by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Despite requests from the IEEE, CSIRO has failed to promise not to sue anyone for infringement.
The next generation Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n, has been under development for years, and delayed many times. But delays may be of little importance: the realisation that CSIRO holds essential patents, and has failed to provide a Letter of Assurance as required by the IEEE, could prevent the standard ever being finalised.
802.11n promises to deliver a fivefold increase in speed, and double the range of 802.11g. Indeed in many cases it’s already delivering something approximating that, as pre-standard kit has been available for almost a year.
Equipment vendors already selling 802.11n kit could easily be infringing CSIRO’s patents, and if no standard is forthcoming then the development process of Wi-Fi, already stalling, could grind to a halt.
Expansionof patents and patent rights (and copyrights etc) is what is killing progress of our civilization. Sadly when “western” civilization finally falls down, it will be mostly thanks to insatiable greed of our lawyers and overprotective laws imposed by corporations to squeeze out few more pennies from the market.
The next generation Wi-Fi standard.. under development for years, …the realisation that CSIRO holds essential patents, …
When did CSIRO get the patents… Last week? 5-years ago?
Why is this just now being “realized”… prompting “urgent” meetings.
Patent-related fiascos just keeps getting better…
Same-day article in the Oregonian talks about delays in getting patents reviewed in the US:
http://tinyurl.com/2gvoz3
Stoel Rives patent attorney Kassim Ferris recently told clients that federal examiners wouldn’t get to their patent application for 72 months.
“I could almost hear their jaw hit the table, that it was going to take six years,” said Ferris, who was relaying the estimate from the Web site of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “They were flabbergasted.”
And we wonder why some companies get patents well after the fact that the technology has become widely-adopted… and affected parties are reduced to arguing about the dates/times of “prior art”.
The USA is just too large to, in all aspects, be managed properly.
Ray Kurzweil says the Singularity is near but I think it will be delayed 50 years because of law suits.
And this is what happens when you put lawyers inside a computer lab.
Um, SN, what is the significance of the lead in picture? A wart covered giant with a walking stick?!? I am not sure what you were going for there.
I think he is comparing lawyers to trolls. If I were a troll I would be offended.
#7, badaboom. 🙂
What’s the point of n? At double the range, that just means more people trying to hack into my wireless. The existing range is good enough for most (non-Al Gore) houses. Plus what’s the point of all that bandwidth, when the sources that you are sharing are operating at 1-10 MBps? The only application is maybe within corporations sharing their private network applications, and they don’t need an IEEE standard.
Patents aren’t all bad.
If you invent something, really invent something, it’s yours. If you cannot productize it yourself due to lack of resources, a patent license is what you can sell.
The problem are trivial patents. Patents that should never have been granted in the first place. Patents on business processes, patents on minor variations in the way of using stuff that has been around for years and patents that are just designed to block others from using technology.
It should be the task of patent offices around the world to weed those out.
Instead, the industrial countries use the number of granted patents in a year as a yardstick to compare their innovative power. That is: if someone starts to be more restrictive about trivial patents, they will start falling behind on that scale. Not good. So the general consensus is: let’s grant patents and if they’re later challenged, so be it, the courts will decide if they will stand or fall.
Problem there is: this favors large corporations who have the money to challenge patents.
pj
The CSIRO are not patent trolls. They are an Australian government owned scientific research and development organisation similar to DARPA. Also, they didn’t just spring this on the IT industry – I remember a story about this over a year agao and it indicated the patents were not new then.
Link to story from 2006 indicating the patents were issued over 10 years ago -http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/16/csiro-wins-landmark-wlan-lawsuit-against-buffalo-more-to-come/
Calls to mind the old story of researchers using lawyers instead of rats.
There are some things that rats just will not do.
Also. Did you know that Tumeric (yes, the culinary ingredient) has been used in India for culinary and medical purposes for over 2,000 years. An American company some time ago world wide patented this stuff for medical use. India now has to pay some millions a year to use a product which originated before lawyers (yes, there was such a time).
Bla bla bla lawyers bla bla bla evil bla bla bla death to all the bla bla bla…
Lawyer; Noun; a guy who is hired by some other fucktard but gets blamed for whatever that fucktard wants the lawyer to do.
I can’t take any of this never ending lawyer slamming seriously any more than any other spectacularly glittering generalities…
Lawyers are evil and retarded.