Commentary--Apple Sues to Invalidate Australian Government Patent on Wi-Fi

Apple along with Dell, HP, Intel, Microsoft and Netgear have sued the Australian government agency CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) to invalidate its US patent 5,487,069. In the patent applied for in 1993 and issued in 1996, CSIRO claims to have invented technology that is essential in wireless networking at frequencies greater than 10-GHz. CSIRO claims that companies producing Wi-Fi equipment such as Apple's AirPort are using on its patented technology and, in fact, most companies making Wi-Fi equipment have been paying CSIRO a license fee. CSIRO was rebuffed when it attempted to enforce its patent against a Japanese company, Buffalo Technology, maker of Wi-Fi equipment. Apple and the other companies now claim that the patent is invalid.

The patent itself reads to us like a very general description of Wi-Fi networking among clients and access points, among access points and among clients in a peer-to-peer arrangement as we know it today. Wi-Fi was developed using the open IEEE standard 802.11b. However, there also appears to be techno-jargon thrown into the patent application that could be real break-through engineering design stuff in the early 1990s but it actually looks like nothing to us non-engineers with 20-20 hindsight. Perhaps, it could fool a US Patent Office patent attorney in the early 1990s, well before Wi-Fi became a widely popular networking tool ignited by Apple's AirPort system.

CSIRO is a credible outfit, one that we know quite well. But we have always questioned patents that are so general. We wonder if anyone has patented automobile racing by describing machines capable of self-locomotion (mCsL) in excess of 3MPH being placed in an order of several across (sA) and several deep (Sd) on an ovoid surface of limited width (osLW) with a starting incription on its surface. The mCsLs are set into motion by an entity with a highly visible object (Hvo) for a fixed number of revolutions set by distance, modulated by entities with a fixed set of rules (fsORs) for the mCsLs, both physical and while in motion, until the distance limit is reached. Whereupon the mCsL which first crosses the starting incription on the osLW is proclaimed the winner by the modulating entities. The winner is given a liquid in a container (liAC), embraced by a scantily-clad female entity (SCfe) and provided with just compensation set forth in the fsORs...."Give me a break!^tm" More... [Bill Fox]