I'm tired of writing this story. (The illustration is from another version of it, put online in Germany.)
Smart people get together and create a standard. It's a universal standard, a free standard, non-proprietary.
Then, years later, after everyone has committed to this free standard, some hoser comes up with a patent claim and decides to shake everyone down.
It's happened again, this time in 802.11. The claim this time is from a Canadian outfit called Wi-LAN, which claims to hold Hedy Lamarr's original patent on what became OFDM.
Until this kind of legal abuse is halted, technology's dog days will continue. Companies like Microsoft need to understand that no matter how hard they work to patent and copyright their stuff, they will never get on top of it.
Patent reform, copyright reform, NOW. You have nothing to lose but your unemployment.
To be fair, Wi-LAN's OFDM patent predates 802.11a, 802.11g, and 802.16/WiMAX. Wi-LAN was very open (obnoxiously so, at times) about the existence of the patent and that they felt, and planned to enforce, that no one could build 802.11a (and follow-on systems such as 802.11g and 802.16/WiMAX) without running afoul of Wi-LAN's patent.
As a participant in the IEEE standards process, Wi-LAN had to promise to "fairly and impartially" be willing to license the patent to anyone who wants it.
This isn't the first time Wi-LAN has sued Cisco. When Cisco made a Wireless Metropolitan Area Network (WMAN) system, Wi-LAN sued them for this same patent infringement. Cisco ultimately killed that product for reasons unrelated to the Wi-LAN lawsuit (it was an expensive dog of a product). Wi-LAN's is emboldened... or increasingly desperate... into action by their licensing of what they claim are additional key patents for OFDM.
Wi-LAN's purchase of the Lamarr patent was entirely symbolic; what they bought was literally the patent document; having long since expired by the time Wi-LAN bought it, it had worth only as a historical document. The income that Lamarr received from Wi-LAN for the patent was the ONLY income that Lamarr EVER realized from the Lamarr/Antheil patent for Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum.