The Australian Government is in your Wifi, Stealing Your Moneyz!

Starting from about 2009, an Australian research firm CSIRO sued its way over existing patents to over 200 million dollars of reimbursement for patent violation. According to the firm, they were the group responsible for the creation of WiFi and have been victimized by the world producing its invention without paying them back. A further lawsuit recently granted them about a $4 royalty on every WiFi enabled device sold, needless to say, that's a whole lot of money.

The controversy here however, isn't the fact that these multimillion lawsuits haven't really surfaced in commercial news, but because the claim of the firm to having "invented" WiFi is shaky at best. Moreover, other electronic inventions such as the Flash Memory Devices that are in every flash drive, iPod, and iPhone today have never rally been definitively copyrighted, highlighting an issue of intellectual property in our changing electronic world.