The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) has launched several more lawsuits against major telcos – AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile – in its battle to receive payment for patents it holds on Wi-Fi.
CSIRO – a publicly funded Australian governmental scientific research agency – has long been fighting to receive royalties for its ownership of a key patent in the 802.11 IEEE standard, the technological standard behind Wi-Fi, and has now brought its case to the US courts.
The move is likely to create some waves, especially as it is the first time the agency has gone after the retail level rather than manufacturers.
Up until now, CSIRO has been targeting the companies behind the patent violating devices, making millions of dollars off the backs of Lenovo, Acer and Sony late last year.
When questioned about the strategy, Nigel Pool CSIRO’s commercialization executive director said, “I’m not going to be exposing what the legal strategy is to a journalist. There’s a legal strategy here that has been thought through very carefully and to a lay person it looks like a pincer movement.
“You could speculate that maybe the infringing products from Verizon or T-Mobile or AT&T are RIM’s (BlackBerry) or Nokia’s or Apple’s iPhones, and that maybe a Broadcom or Marvell supply their chip sets,” added Pool menacingly.
One thing, however, seems clear: when one looks at the list of companies who have licenced the patent from CSIRO, one sees that the three largest telcos have a serious problem on their hands. That’s because Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Asus, Fujitsu, HP, Nintendo, Toshiba, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton and 3Com have all purportedly signed licensing agreements.
While many people have been sceptical of the lawsuits and quick to speculate that CSIRO is just grabbing for money, we cant help but be thankful that in this case the money the organization receives goes back into more research rather than lining some CEO’s pocket. A worthy cause in our humble opinion.
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