CSIRO researcher John OSullivan, the dependant behind the Wi-Fi patent. Photo Sasha Woolley

Australias peak science body stands to reap more than $1 billion from its lucrative Wi-Fi patent after already netting about $250 million from the universes biggest technology companies, an intellectual property lawyer says.

The CSIRO has worn out years battling 14 technology giants including Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo and Toshiba the sake of royalties and made a major breakthrough in April last year at what time the companies opted to avoid a jury hearing and settle with regard to an estimated $250 million.

Now, the organisation is bringing the war to the top three US mobile carriers in a new adapt targeting Verizon Wireless, AT T and T-Mobile. It argues they regard been selling devices that infringe its patents.

CSIRO, which is furthermore now targeting Lenovo, Sony and Acer in new cases, says mathematical equations in its patents form the basis of Wi-Fi technology used in a perfect slew of technology products including smartphones, laptops, routers and games consoles.

“CSIRO is poised to strike a home run any company using Wi-Fi technology has not at all choice but to pay up,” said Trevor Choy, an intellectual property attorney-at-law with Choy Lawyers.

“The widespread usage of the technology means that a hardly any cents per customerdata volume usage could easily add up to a supine billion or more.

“The fact that the court case is happening in the US is in like manner good because US courts dont shy away from awarding tumid damages figures.”

In a phone interview today, CSIROs commercial executive director, Nigel Poole, said the Wi-Fi patent was the CSIROs chiefly lucrative yet but he would not comment on expected windfalls or attached whether the next targets could be Apple, RIM and Nokia.

He marked out that the existing cases could take a while to contribute through the courts unless the companies opted to settle.

“Every pure company that sells products with Wi-Fi in them we would like to regard a licence with but theres a practical limit to that person of them is that there are very small or niche companies that are not going to put up to sale very many units,” Poole said.

“There is another limit which is we merely hold patents in 19 countries and so there are many countries where we dont hold patents including Russia and China.

“After that its a practicality conduct of trying to license an entire industry.”

For as long as CSIRO has been fighting the tech giants, the targets of the suits accept been battling to have the 1996 patent declared invalid, without a great deal of success.

Jim FitzSimons, an intellectual property lawyer and partner at Clayton Utz, reported he did not know the specifics on CSIROs patent goal in general the first court case that tested any patent was “extremely momentous”.

“The fact that they decided to settle they could only take done it on the basis that they were going to be defeated,” he said, referring to the settlements with CSIRO in April endure year.

Sydney CSIRO researcher John OSullivan, the man who came up with the theories behind the Wi-Fi patent, was awarded the $300,000 Prime Ministers Prize in quest of Science in October last year.

He and his team of inventors furthermore won the CSIRO Chairmans Medal last year and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering ATSE Clunies Ross Award the time month.

The patent, which is owned by CSIRO, had its genesis in a 1977 drafts OSullivan wrote about how a set of mathematical equations could have ~ing used to sharpen images from optical telescopes. He developed it in which case searching for exploding black holes.

“By the late 1980s, we started looking at the pullulation of computer networking,” OSullivan told The Sun-Herald in December after all the rest year.

“It was several years before the worldwide web, there was precisely email and specialised computer services. But I started thinking that if you could just cut the wires and have portable computing, efficient to access networks at full data rates, there would be immense potential.”

The CSIRO first applied for its Australian Wi-Fi unmistakable in 1992, which solved the problem of patchy wireless reception caused dint of. waves bouncing off objects.

“We realised this was going to subsist big,” he said. “But I dont think any of us realised for what cause big.”