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unexistance

potential patent troll

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/5v8joz/mass_pro...

based on https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/how-the-aussie-g...

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> potential patent troll

I must be confused. How are they a patent troll if they actually do the the R&D part of the patent? A patent troll would buy the filed patent and just spend money enforcing it to collect cash...

I am a bit biased because I'm Australian and fully support the CSIRO. They're a non-profit entity[0] - their mandate isn't to make money. The money they do collect from royalties is rolled back into their research.

[0] In that they don't produce a profit for stakeholders. They're a government agency though, not a registered charity.

I'm a big fan of the CSIRO too. But I think it's fair to say that under the current government they've pushed towards a more commercialisation / applied science view of the world. For instance, NICTA (Australia's premier government funded Computer Science research... thingy) has been defunded and merged into CSIRO.

They now operate as 'Data61' on a semi-commercial basis. Again, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing: I'm actually working with some of the NICTA/Data61 guys on one of their projects, and they are doing a number of these across the APS. If anything, it's been great to unleash these guys on the APS, where IT expertise is sorely lacking. They seem to be very good at what they do (and have a heavy focus on applying machine-learning to real-world problems).

Their new CEO, Larry Marshall actually created a number of US startups centred on lasers/optics (sorry, don't know the proper term) and holds a number of patents in this area. I met the guy when he gave a presentation at my workplace, and this carbon-fibre work is very much in line with the strategy he outlined. He's a decent guy who, IMHO, has been given a pretty unfair run in the press (who have taken a number of his statements out of context and portrayed him as some kind of anti-science luddite). Incidentally, he reads PG's essays :)

I don't really have a point here, just providing some background information in case you find it interesting (and apologies if I sound like a bit of a cheerleader). This shift in CSIRO's focus might have been the one and only thing our idiot government has gotten right over two terms of government (or, at least, the one thing they didn't totally screw up).

EDIT: And just to concur, the assertion that CSIRO is a patent troll doesn't pass the laugh test.

> EDIT: And just to concur, the assertion that CSIRO is a patent troll doesn't pass the laugh test.

Most of the people everyone outside Australia who've heard of CSIRO at all know of them because of what is viewed as a shakedown of WiFi manufacturers. It seems more sad than funny.

It's a shame people have this view. They don't seem very interested in the actual facts of the matter either, judging by the reaction to the other post I made on this topic.

Oh well...

You "balanced out" an Arstechnica article with a really mediocre one from The Register. You expected a positive reaction?

The Arstechnica article was actually a series of two: the first harshly criticising the CSIRO and the second 'clarifying' the first because of the outcry it caused. I thought the Register article was highly relevant because it directly addressed some of the assertions made in the Arstechnica article.

I'm not asserting the Arstechnica article is wrong and the Register article is right. But it's an alternate view from what is, as far as I can tell, an unbiased observer. I'm sorry it doesn't line up with the views that you quite obviously hold, but that's just how life is sometimes. You might also wish to consider whether your dismissal of The Register's assertions is logical, as it basically amounts to:

P: I don't like A.

P: A is asserting X.

C: Therefore X is wrong.

I've read all these articles. The Register article didn't strike me as any less tabloidish than is standard for them.

Other than a vague assertion that that The Register article is 'tabloidish', what in the Register article do you think is untrue? They make pretty specific and easily falsifiable claims (as opposed to the Arstechnica articles), so it's really not that hard to point out where you think they're specifically wrong. Do you have anything of actual substance to add to this?

(none of the below has anything to do with CSIRO, really)

I haven't got the slightest idea why you view The Register's article as being of superior quality to Ars's, regardless of how you stand on the issues, since it's just a small, sarcastic ("Evil Aussie tax on Wi-Fi") attack on what the author views as the weakest parts of what Ars wrote. Even a blogger would put more effort in.

But it seems to me the Register adds a useful, but douchey ("Cisco was scammed!") elaboration on the role of Radiata, sidesteps the question of whether the amount CSIRO was asking was RAND (which is the whole point of everything), and makes some very pathetic attempts to appear balanced in the last two paragraphs. "The hyperbolic statements made by Australia’s science minister and various press should be challenged." But not in this article.

Sorry, but this is crappy writing not worthy of deeper consideration. At least Ars tried to write something.

edit: thanks for really putting the effort in with your reply!

So, no.

Well it's certainly been a laugh and a half.

I believe the contention in the WiFi case is whether CSIRO really did do the R&D actually used in WiFi, or if it just happened to get lucky with a patent. Of course, they presumably did vaguely do some sort of R&D in this space given they were awarded a patent themselves, rather than buying it off some other entity, like a patent troll would.

Considering how messed up the patent system can get, it's really confusing how this one instance is where they decide to get worked up about. At least CSIRO seems to do legitimate research in the area, and it is not hunting down small scale players to make them pay up for questionable patents. This is the really abusive part of current patent law, not which research org or corporation gets "blessed" by the patent office.

They invented the technology used for WiFi for radio astronomy, it is as legitimate an invention as it gets.

They are about as far from patent troll as you can get. They're basically a modern-day, government-funded Bell labs in that their mandate is to carry out fundamental scientific research. Their research spans a mind-bogglingly large number of fields including fundamental climate science, agriculture, technology, biology, astronomy, etc. - the list goes on. As one of the other sibling comments suggests, just because their interests overlap with patent trolls doesn't make them one. The very large differences between CSIRO and other patent trolls have been outlined.

Having said that, I'd liked to have seen them handle the wifi case(s) better - I'm not sure I could say how, however. That said, I also believe that they're warranted in their attempts to get some compensation out of the contributions they made that were eventually adopted wholesale across the industry - you'd expect a private organisation to see financial benefit from it and I don't think that's much different if it's government-funded either.

In both that case and this, whether their specific contributions to a developing technology warrant being patentable or not will differ from person to person. I'm sure I don't agree with Stallman on this, for example. I'm not going to try to say it should be one way or another definitively but to paint the CSIRO as a patent troll is a tremendous leap of illogic that requires a fundamental ignorance to what they do. At best, you could claim that their aggressive use of patent litigation doesn't align with how you feel about patents - and I could certainly see why some would feel that way. That's more a question of the role of patents themselves and their scope than a question of the validity of the CSIRO as an organisation, though.

NB: I am Aussie, to the extent that may make me biased given my tax funds this org.

Edit: it's also worth noting that the guy you cited on Reddit is claiming they 'feel like' a patent troll because their website looks similar to Intellectual Ventures' one. He openly admits to being wholly ignorant to who they are and hsvinfno knowledge of their history or purpose.

CSIRO is not a troll, per se, but in court they walk like a troll and talk like a troll. Among other things, they seek royalty payments so big you would think that they had actually invented the whole of 802.11, and they do, in fact, claim that WiFi would not "work" without their inventions. Let's not forget that the standard prescribes a functionality and not an implementation. I say this as someone who has been personally involved in some of the patent litigation being discussed here.

Of course a patent lawyer is going to talk up their claims as much as possible to get a good deal. And patent law is tilted towards the plaintiff to such an extent that it encourages a shotgun approach in order to get something through that will allow them to seek damages. This is why it's hard for courts to sort out legitimate claimants from non-producing entities that are trying to just make a buck from real companies.

The main difference is NPEs target smaller companies and then talk up their claims in the initial phases, then try to settle out of court as quickly as possible so they don't incur alot of expense and can avoid discovery, which is where their patents may get knocked out completely.

Trolls who target small players in the hopes of raking in small settlements all over the place are a real evil, to be sure. But from my perspective working on this sort of litigation for a living, the real threat is actually damages in cases involving standard-essential patents, and that's where the troll line starts to blur.

Plaintiffs like CSIRO may not be trolls, per se, but they use the same hired gun damages experts that the trolls do (like Ocean Tomo). The amount of money they seek is completely untenable in the context of standard essential patents, if only because our phones and computers would cost astronomically more money if everyone holding one of the thousands of allegedly standard-essential patents got the kind of money plaintiffs like CSIRO ask for in these cases.

As an aside, patents don't really get "knocked out" in discovery. They get knocked out by defendants filing IPRs, seeking re-exam by the PTO, and occasionally at trial. It's unbelievably rare for a judge to invalidate a patent on summary judgment (which happens post-discovery).

While the whole WiFi thing is a little weird, CSIRO is a productive research organisation, e.g. Data61 (formerly NICTA, of seL4 fame) is part of it, as are most (all?) of the large telescopes in Australia, including the ASKAP precursor to the Square Kilometre Array.

CSIRO is a government-funded research body - not having factories to produce what it researches doesn't make it a patent troll.

But having a track record of suing everybody for being the so-called "inventor" of WiFi three years after it was actually standardized, legitimately makes this body a PATENT TROLL. Whether they do fund actual research is irrelevant, as it would be irrelevant for a criminal to claim that he also donate to charity.

I'm guessing its the author's embellishment to drive clicks

they didn't invent wifi, they invented modern wifi

from the horse's mouth, the lawyer representing the company in the relevant case: "CSIRO did not invent the concept of wireless LAN, it just invented the best way of doing it, the best way it's used now throughout the world,"

In addition, it does seem they had a strong desire to make use of their patent, approaching potential partners, and creating spun-off companies, centered around making use of the technology

They patented OFDM, which is the modulation technique that was introduced in 802.11a. They did not invent wifi. They just discovered an effective combination of parameters and patented it before it was adopted. It is not clear to me if the adoption was because of the patent or because of independent discovery.

It's much narrower than that. OFDM has been around since the 1960s. CSIRO didn't invent it.

CSIRO patented its use in WLAN setups (including WiFi).

It's controversial because they're only major first was to implement WLAN setups using OFDM with forward ECC. In any case they were merely taking something already used in cellular phone networks and applying to another kind of broadcast setup.

No they did not patent OFDM, the patented the combination of an OFDM encoding schema and forward ECC, which, in combination allowed effective data transmission in a highly reflective environment. Everything the patent was based on was already known. Patents like this are not for inventing something new but combining some existing things to allow something new.

Actually the patent was filed four years before 802.11 was standardised. From the Ars article:

> The premier world engineering institution, the IEEE, created a working group for the evolving 802.11 wireless standard in 1990, a full three years before CSIRO filed for its key wireless patent. The group voted repeatedly on which way to go forward and produced heaps of records, but CSIRO didn't even participate in the 802.11 committee. The group published the first 802.11 standard in 1997 and CSIRO came forward years after the fact.

The working group was created in 1990, the patent was filed in 1993 and the 802.11 standard first published in 1997.

Yeah, just to balance out the arstechnica view of things, the register article goes in to some of the detail:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/10/csiro_patent_trolls_...

Long story short: CSIRO did participate in the process through a third party (the first company they licensed their tech to). They also agree to the IEEE's request that they would licence the IP on 'fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms' (note: not free). When they approached vendors and made an initial offer of $4 a pop, vendors refused to pay and ended up in court. Honestly I think wifi vendors simply misjudged the probability of CSIRO taking them to court if they didn't cough up.

The industry part of its name is important here. Most of its work is done in collaboration with people who do have factories

The classic patent troll is a hollow legal structure intended as a vehicle to shake people down for money on a possibly spurious threat.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is, as the name suggests, an honest-to-god pure and applied research body.

If CSIRO researchers invent a thing and the CSIRO patents it, they damn well deserve their fair royalties.

See Fraunhofer's history in the MP3 patents mess. Other research institutions have had similar issues.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/technology/05music.htm...

It's just unfortunate that the interests of public research institutes often overlaps with those of patent trolls. Previous attempts to reform patent law in the USA have all been defeated partially due to strong opposition and lobbying by major universities.

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