CSIRO patent windfall as Aussie inventiveness honoured

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 14 October 2009 12:02

IT Industry - Market

Australia's national science agency, the CSIRO, has gained $200 million in extra revenue from a successful legal challenge to the use of its patented wireless technology that is now used in more than 800 million devices around the world.

Today, as it honours the ‘inventiveness” of the Australian team that developed the technology, the CSIRO chairman, Dr John Stocker, said the multi-million dollar revenue boost had come as a result, earlier this year, of a settlement to the patent dispute with 14 companies under confidential terms.

The CSIRO’s executive director, commercial, Nigel Poole said that an announcement will soon be made about how Australian research will benefit from the success of the legal dispute.

As iTWire reported in April this year, the largest IT company in the world, Hewlett-Packard, was humbled by the CSIRO when it agreed to settle for an undisclosed sum over its long running Wi-Fi patent infringement suit, followed by Fujitsu also reaching a settlement with the CSIRO.
 
And, in June this year, iTWire reported that following that successful first wave of legal action against HP and Fujitsu, the CSIRO gave notice that it was going after the rest of the industry.

The history of the long-running legal battles between the CSIRO and companies around the world, is that a US patent was granted in 1996 and, in 1999, one of the first modern international standards for WLAN (IEEE 802.11a) relied on the technology covered by CSIRO’s patent for its implementation. In 2001 the first products entered the market.
 
Nigel Poole said the CSIRO “set out to encourage the industry to take licenses for the use of its patented technology,” but, “when that did not prove successful, we initiated legal proceedings which then led to proceedings being initiated against CSIRO.”

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