One of the things that hasn’t been discussed in the media at the moment is almost hilarious. If you’ve ever bought anything with a Wi-Fi technology in it, you’ll know several brand names, like Belkin, D-Link, Nintendo (receivers in the DS), Intel, ASUS, etc. It turns out the original concept for Wi-Fi was patented worldwide by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which is the ‘national government body for Scientific Research in Australia’. The specific patent relates to the IEEE standards of 802.11b and 802.11g. This means that any product that uses these technologies, that hasn’t discussed it with the Patent Holder, CSIRO, is in deep cow manure.

This whole debacle has come to a peak, with a settlement just completed with Hewlett Packard, but the CSIRO recently published the list of companies that legal proceedings have been filed with.

Intel, Dell, Toshiba, Asus, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton, 3-Com, Buffalo, Microsoft and Nintendo.

The settlements have all been confidential, but they would be significantly large when you consider the current broad deployment and usage of these technologies. It makes me smile, to know that in 1993 a patent filed on Wi-Fi is bringing massive multi-national companies to its knees, and it was essentially filed by the Australian Government.

Here’s a link to the Patent.