Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) reached a $229 million settlement with Acer, AT&T, Leveno, Sony, and T-Mobile for a license to its Wi-Fi patent.
Mr. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols' Australian government patent troll collects from Wi-Fi Vendors gives the details in ZDNet today. I enjoyed this article, but found the conclusion that CSIRO is a patent troll unsupported given the industry's decision to license rather than challenge the validity of the patent.
The total for CSIRO is over $430 million given it made over $200 million licensing the patent to 3Com, Asus, Buffalo Technologies, D-Link, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Microsoft, Netgear, Nintendo, and Toshiba in 2009. See ZDNet article for information on some of the settlements reached in 2009 here.
Note Columbia Law School Professor Richard Stern's article, Preventing abuse of IEEE standards policy.
Copyright © 2012 Robert Moll. All rights reserved.
