The CSIRO's bid to monetise its intellectual property incorporated in 802.11a wireless LAN technology has gained widespread publicity. Now a long-running battle by another Australian company to extract licence fees from manufacturers of asynchronous transfer mode technology could be in the spotlight following it gaining a US patent for a key component of all ATM products. Perth-based ASX-listed Ipernica (ASX: IPR - that this also stands for intellectual property rights is deliberate) announced on 8 January that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) had issued it with a patent covering its Segmentation and Reassembly (SAR) technology.
It already holds patents for the technology in Germany, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom and has for several years been engaged in court action in Germany against Siemens and Deutsche Telekom seeking to extract licence fees. However it has had no success to date, despite early announcements that it expected tens of million of dollars of licence revenue to flow into its coffers in the following year.
"The US patent represents a major addition to our SAR patent portfolio, since the US is home to many world leaders in the manufacture and sale of wide area network products, such as ATM telecommunications equipment", Graham Griffiths, Ipernica's managing director said...Securing this patent protection in the US for the SAR technology represents a significant company milestone and concludes what has been an ongoing process of more than 10 years. The rigorous process adopted by the USPTO gives us comfort that our SAR intellectual property rights are fully enforceable".
If Ipernica is ultimately successful in prosecuting its IPR claims the revenue potential would be enormous, and would be gained by retrospective application to ATM equipment already sold. The patent would be back-dated to 1991 and would expire in 2008. However it would cover the most important period in ATM usage: the technology, still the core of telco transmission networks is now being phased out in favour of Internet protocol systems.
When queried about the patents, Griffiths told iTWire: "We are talking about a patent family, all with the 1991 priority date, and extending through 2008. So we have coverage over the important period when ATM deployment peaked, although as we near the end of patent life, Internet Protocol based networks increasingly are replacing carrier ATM networks."
NEA Price at posting:
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