CSIRO's 802.11 patent hopes buoyed by change of court

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 20 December 2006 15:27

Business IT - Technology

Curiously, in a detailed examination of the development and commercialisation of the CSIRO's intellectual property underpinning 802.11a/g, commissioned by the Australian Department of Education, Science and Training in 2003, the authors question whether there is a direct link between the CSIRO's patent and the 802.11a/g standard.

They suggest that "the dissemination of some information on the potential intellectual property prior to the publication of the US patent served a useful purpose in informing the design of the new standard. CSIRO's wireless LAN patent did influence the new standard, but in the diffuse and hard to trace manner that is a characteristic of public good research."

And they add that "well-informed individuals support the view that there is only an indirect connection between CSIRO's wireless LAN patent and the subsequent 802.11a standard. In this view, the patent is based on finding a non-trivial practical solution to wireless LANs based upon parameters set by the laws of physics over radio-wave propagation in this frequency range. Similarly, IEEE 802.11a is also based upon these immutable physical laws. Consequently, the design of IEEE 802.11a is likely to have ended up as it did without CSIRO's patent simply because this is a logical solution."

The complete report can be downloaded from here.