Court puts CSIRO Wi-Fi injunction on hold

December 4, 2008, 03:47 PM —  IDG News Service — 

A federal court in the U.S. has temporarily lifted an injunction that banned Buffalo Technology (USA) from selling its IEEE 802.11a and 802.11g Wi-Fi products due to a patent claim by an Australian scientific agency.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) sued Japanese IT hardware vendor Buffalo and its U.S. affiliate in 2005, claiming the companies had infringed a U.S. patent held by CSIRO. The suit alarmed some people in the networking industry because CSIRO was claiming it held a patent on elements of the popular Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers standards on which Wi-Fi gear is based.

CSIRO said at the time that it had offered to license its technology on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms but was rebuffed by the industry. It initiated the Buffalo suit as a test case. It also has suits pending against Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Netgear, Toshiba, 3Com, Nintendo, Marvell and other companies.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas found that Buffalo's products infringed parts of the patent, and in June 2007 imposed a permanent injunction against Buffalo that stopped it from manufacturing, importing, selling or using its Wi-Fi products. Buffalo appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C.

In September, the appeals court questioned whether CSIRO's patent claims were valid and sent the case back to the lower court in Texas. Buffalo then asked that court to stay the injunction while the patent issue was resolved. Buffalo expects the court to schedule a trial soon on the validity of CSIRO's claims.

With the injunction lifted, Buffalo said it is free to sell 802.11a, 802.11g and 802.11n products in the U.S.

CSIRO officials were not immediately available for comment.

IDG News Service

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

I like it!
Close

On Twitter now

CSIRO

Powered by Twitter
You are logged in | Sign out
Sign in and post to Twitter

What are you thinking?

Cancel Tweet sent

On Twitter now

Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
peer-to-peer

Esther Schindler
If the comments are ugly, the code is ugly

claird
SVG a graphics format for 21st century

pasmith
Take Chrome OS for a test spin

Sandra Henry-Stocker
Solaris Tip: Have Your Files Changed Since Installation?

sjvn
64-bits of protection?

jfruh
Android fragments vs. the iPhone monolith

mikelgan
What Gizmodo missed about the Pro WX Wireless USB disk drive

 

Sidekick: The Good News & the Bad News
Either way you look at it Microsoft Data Center management did not follow standards or best practices in this failure. In which case it makes me wonder more about the outsourcing of corporate data much less personal data.
- mburton325

Join the conversation here

The Daily Tip

The Daily TipQuick, practical advice for IT pros. Made fresh daily.

Hot tips:

Want to cash in on your IT savvy? Send your tip to tips@itworld.com. If we post it, we'll send you a $25 Amazon e-gift card.

Newsletters

Subscribe to ITWORLD TODAY and receive the latest IT news and analysis.

I would like to receive offers via email from ITworld partners.
By clicking submit you agree to the terms and conditions outlined in ITworld's privacy policy.
Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace