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.
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.
