Last Friday, a federal court in Texas granted Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, an injunction to prevent infringement of its wireless network patent by Buffalo-group companies in the US. The injunction prevents the sales of all wireless LAN products by Buffalo until a license for CSIRO technology is negotiated.

CSIRO had begun a test case against the Buffalo companies in February 2005 in Texas, after the industry had failed to accept CSIRO’s offers to license its wireless local area network (WLAN) patents on reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) terms.

The same Texas judge, Judge Leonard Davis, ruled last November in a summary judgment, that CSIRO's U.S. Patent No. 5,487,069 was valid. [related story].

CSIRO also has cases pending against a number of other US, Japanese and Taiwanese companies. Marvell filed a counter-suit on May 4 in Tyler, Texas. According to this Bloomberg report, Intel and Microsoft have also counter-sued and have been joined by Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Netgear in asking for a ruling that the 1996 patent doesn't cover any aspect of the 802.11a and 802.11g networking standards or is invalid.

Other pending cases involve Toshiba, Fujitsu, ASUS, D-Link, Belkin, Accton, SMC Networks, 3Com and Nintendo.

Absent from this list are industry-leaders Cisco and its Linksys subsidiary, both of which are significant suppliers of wireless networking gear. This is due to its purchase in 2000 of Radiata. According to this Canberra Times article, "Cisco is in the clear because in 2001 it bought Radiata, a company formed by CSIRO and Macquarie University in 1997 to commercialise the technology. It therefore inherited Radiata's agreement with CSIRO to pay it a proportion of the licence royalties earned by the technology".

It does not appear that the injunction requires retailers to stop selling Buffalo wireless products. A check of numerous online retailers showed Buffalo wireless products still available for sale.

Buffalo has not responded to requests for comment regarding the ruling.

Tags: Buffalo, CSIRO, WiFi,

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