Other entities get pulled in, too. Show up at an industry standards-setting meeting in which a plaintiff or defendant is participating, and you might get a subpoena, just for good measure.

Patent pools are sometimes used for efficiency, including that gained from reduced litigation. Techdirt makes an argument against them saying they restrict innovation.  It prefers to let the market decide, presumably by having patent holders negotiate with each other. It has a point, but that is what wireless companies did before patent pools, and the pools’ formation were themselves a market response to that hassle. I don’t think the IEEE 802.11 patent pool has hindered the remarkable innovation still ongoing in that family of technologies. To the extent it has, I think it would be offset by patent pool efficiencies, such as moving things along more quickly. If companies don’t like a pool, they can and do choose to not join and instead negotiate separately. Qualcomm and some other companies, for example, chose to sit out the patent pool for 3G W-CDMA, even though they held essential patents.

The Washington Post reports on a speech by White House Budget Director Peter Orszag:

“The U.S. Patent Office receives 80 percent of its applications electronically. But then patent office bureaucrats have to print them out and scan them by hand into an outdated case management system.”

Today, there are several ways to determine the location of a wireless device in a network. As a rough estimate, the device knows the identification of the base station or access point with which it is associated. That’s a start, but a base station can cover a wide area. To refine that, devices can use GPS. Networks of cellular base stations can measure differences in the timing or signal strength of an uplink signal, and use the results to estimate location. MAC addresses of Wi-Fi access points can be sniffed and mapped by roving monitors. Sometimes, two or more of these techniques are used in concert.

Google adds another technique to the list as described in a January 28 patent application: mapping packet data rates to distances. Generally, the closer a wireless device is to a base station or access point, the higher the data rate due to the better quality signal. For a particular system and environment, one can create a table mapping different data rates to corresponding distances. The mapped results can then be used to estimate the location of devices relative to each other in the network. If the locations of some devices in the network are known absolutely (maybe a few have GPS), the locations of other devices can be determined absolutely.

As with the other techniques above, the results produced are not exact. The measured data rates can vary not only as a function of distance but also due to other factors including varying propagation conditions, varying transmit power, and interference. Part of the patent covers a method for estimating and assigning an accuracy and confidence level to the results.