CSIRO takes HP to cleaners over Wi-Fi patent - next!

By Stan Beer
Thursday, 02 April 2009 20:02

Opinion and Analysis

The largest IT company in the world, Hewlett-Packard, has been humbled by Australia's national science agency CSIRO and agreed to settle for an undisclosed sum over a long running Wi-Fi patent infringement suit. The win against the Silicon Valley colossus has given CSIRO ammunition to continue pursuing 13 other technology giants for millions of dollars in licensing fees.

CSIRO holds patents on the 802.11a and 802.11g Wi-Fi standards, which have been used extensively in routers, wireless networking cards and other Wi-Fi networking products for the past decade.

The list of names that have sold products based on the CSIRO held patents reads like a who's who in consumer wireless technology: Intel, Netgear, Belkin, D-Link, Microsoft, Dell, Nintendo, Toshiba, and Asus, among others.

All of those companies are much bigger than CSIRO but the Australian research agency, which generates income by developing technology and licensing it to industry, is still substantial with 50 offices and 6500 highly qualified science and technology researchers on staff.

The successful four year defence of its patents against HP infringements means that the CSIRO now has a good chance of defeating the other technology giants and winning substantial settlements worth millions in licensing fees.

The use of Wi-Fi over the past ten years has become pervasive with tens of millions of portable computers and increasingly smaller devices such as mobile handsets tapping into hotspots around the world each day.

The technology that makes this happen is based largely on patents first granted to CSIRO in 1996.

The win by CSIRO against HP is also likely to do much to restore faith in the intellectual property rights protection system that patents are meant to uphold. In recent years, technology giants with deep pockets have often succeeded in thwarting the efforts of genuine patent holders to get just compensation for the use of their IP.