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Charles Walton, the Father of RFID
Roland Piquepaille writes "In a very interesting article, the San Jose Mercury News tells us about Charles Walton, the man behind the radio frequency identification technology (RFID). Since his first patent about it in 1973, Walton, now 83 years old, collected about $3 million from royalties coming from his patents. Unfortunately for him, his latest patent about RFID expired in the mid-1990s. So he will not make any money from the billions of RFID tags that will appear in the years to come. But he continues to invent and his latest patent about a proximity card with incorporated PIN code protection was granted in June 2004. Maybe he'll be luckier with this one. This overview contains some excerpts of the original article. It also contains tips to search for Walton's patents and an image of the front page of his first patent."
Frankly, this is one patent that wouldn't bother me had it not expired.
Were licensing fees prohibitive for mass-scale introduction of RFID tags, personal privacy would be safer.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Maybe he'll be luckier with this one.
At 83, I don't think he is really that interested in the monetary aspects of the invention process.
This is why we have patents, everyone is just so used to predatory patents nowadays that someone not making money hand-over-fist from a patent seems strange.
I want to say I feel bad that he won't be collecting the billions to come. But then he already made millions.
"I am become death, the tracker of products."
We can't put the genie back in the bottle.
He made three million dollars. I should be 1/2 as lucky as him..... sheesh
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He has a patent for it, after all. And we all know that the US Parent Office only grants patents when there are clear examples of existing prior art, right? Think about it!
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i don't understand the big fear of lack of privacy due to RFID tags. capitalism just takes care of it. if enough people don't want their location known, there will be a market for clothing, etc that does not have RFID tags embedded in it. the government's never going to say (knock on wood) that all clothes or shoes or whatever must have RFID tags, so it's really not something to worry about.
-ninjaneer
Until after he dies or the patent does, and more likely the later. Which is sad- because proximity cards (a special case of RFID) with pin numbers is one kinda neat access system. Not half as neat as a proximity card with voice recognition password, but still close.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
This guy came up with RFIDs... You'd think he'd be a lifelong enemy of the slashdot tin-foil hat crowd.
Slightly off topics, but the poor ($ and luck) bastard invents something useful and the patent expires, Disney makes some cartoons, bribes some congressmen, and gets to keep the things in copyright forever.
I want these tags on me Disc Golf discs! I lose to many and at $10 a pop it gets expensive. Just wonder if they are small enought to be embedded in the discs. Then we just need a hand held locator to find them with.
OK, RFID is an invention, I'll grant that. And I'll not get into the endless debate over the good and evil of it. But given the RFID is over 20 years old, what part of a proximity card with incorporated PIN code isn't so obvious and apparent to the average engineer that it should qualify for a patent? And isn't there plenty of prior art?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Which is why all the previous posts say "oh, it sucks he wont be making anymore money off RFID", "hes so unlucky".
Hmmm.
this should be used as a perfect example of how patents are supposed to work?
You make your money off it, then it is released to the public domain for the common good? (although that "good" part may be questioned by some in this case)
Go ask Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman about making money from patents. they hardly cashed in on what was one of the net's most successful algorithms. Multiplying large primes was an important breakthrough in cryptography, I think Schnier states this in one of his diatribes.
The point is, if society doesn't use your invention en masse until after the patent expires, it's not a reason to extend patents any further than they already are.
Look, almost everyone on Slashdot and the technical media agree, the patent system is horribly broken and corrupted. For every story on the guy who ONLY made $3M on RFID, there are many more stories of bullshit patents on spellcheckers or the use of cookies in browsers to shop (the Bezos debacle) and a million other reasons not to hear the sob story and say "damn, he should be rich(er) but he's not!"
Coincidence?
Side note: maybe Disney and the entertainment industry could take a hint and continuously invent new stuff like Charles Walton, rather than lobby to extend the copyright timeframe every few years.
They just keep coming around like flies to feces!
For a second I thought that the founder of Walmart was also behind the developement of the RFID thechnology.
LG+
Were the patent still in force he could charge less than a penny per tag and he would still get rich (there will be billions and billions of tags) and the cost wouldn't be prohibitive.
If he insisted on a high fee, such as a dollar per tag that would certainly slow the adoption of the technology, but why would he do that?
In the end the market would have dictated the price and it would be low in order to allow adoption of the technology and maximize his profit. In that case, what you are saying would not be any more applicable than it is today.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I wonder if he shops at Walmart...
Yeah, so if patents are supposed to be so good for the field/economy/humanity, how is it that most technology is not fully explored/exploited until after the patent expired?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Is this another example of how the patent system fails to compensate inventors or is it an example of how patents prevent innovation. It could be stated either way.
What's the use of extending patents beyond their current lifespan? If the invention is great enough it will make the inventor enough money from it's licensing.
Hmmm.
He did not invent RFID technology, it has been around since WWII, albeit in different forms, he did a fair amount esp for the commercialization of passive RFID tech but did NOT invent RFID thecnology
Patently stupid.
This man actually invents stuff (like it or dislike it, RFID is certainly exciting), and gets shafted, but some lame schmucks "invent" the use of cookies (someone else's invention) on a web browser (ibid) over the Internet (ibid) and gets a freaking patent.
What is this world coming to?
Uh, hate to break it to you but the cryptography "breakthroughs" by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman weren't breakthroughs at all. The people who first discovered how to multiply large primes, etc were the scientists at Bletchley Park during World War Two.
Unfortunately, the British government classified all of their work and, after the war, destroyed virtually every record of what went on at Bletchley. However, it's clear from recent (last twenty years) interviews with some of the cryptographers who worked there that their pioneering work in code breaking covered what we today refer to as RSA encryption and a whole lot more.
So, in RSA's case, there was prior art but that prior art was kept a secret because of national security concerns.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
So what you're saying is this guy held up a multi billion dollar industry for twenty years for the sake of 3 million in royalities. If anything, this is a great example of why patents are so evil.
By delaying 20 years, I would bet the guy has easially lost more than 3 million in opportunity costs anyhow - and does he deserve that amount if someone else would have invented the same thing anyhow a month after he did?
was paying $10 for a fucking frisbee.
Looks like my search time limit has expired. Damn shame, I was just getting started. Too bad search time limits aren't like copyrights.
Then, when some company wants to implement your idea, you can
Last week, Intermec filed suit against Matrics over RFID Patent Infringment. Intermec owns a WIDE variety of patents in the RFID space that are very general in nature.
e /t echnology/story/0,10801,93744,00.html
For those of you who don't live in the RFID world...Matrics is the vendor who's hardware is being put into WalMart. Many insiders believe that Intermec's lawsuit was designed to poision the water around a possible acquistion of Matrics by one of Intermec's competitors. There is also a general train of thought that Intermec tactically blundered by moving too soon, they should have waited 6 more months for the RFID initiative within WalMart to really catch on before they hit the industry with royalties.
http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobil
We are but the sum of our experiances
I don't know about prior art, but the idea isn't half-bad. The patent describes a card that has an actual keypad on it, with the hash of the PIN number stored inside the card. You then input the PIN number on the card itself, and the hashes are compared. This enables data on the card to be read for some amount of time. It would be preferable to having to PIN/password on the reader for two reasons, the first is that you would only need one universal password for it to work everywhere, and the second is that the data on the card could be encrypted as a function of the hash of the PIN number.
Good, and very informative article. Can't help but thinking that the guy had his heart and mind in the right place when he invented this. I don't think he envisioned big-brother style monitoring as a use. ..and I also liked the advertising on the side of the blog ("Reach Technologically savvy people"), and how it has anti Bush-Cheney books listed. Apparently those of us who are techno-literate are also anti-Bush...
And actually I am. Go Kerry! Lesser of two evils!
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
I get so sick of people talking about how technology is bad.
Technology is technology... it is not good or bad. OK?
Men can use technology in good or bad ways. For example, an axe can chop down a tree or cut someone's head off. It's simply a piece of technology. Scissors can cut paper, they can also be jammed into someone's jugular vein. Nuclear energy provides power for business es and residents everywhere, it also can be used to blow up countries.
Nothing personal, it's just technology. It's inanimate. It has no feelings. It doesn't care how it might be used. It's just there for use.
My high school used the Schlage RFID system for access to the dorm^H^Hresidence halls. The readers were sensitive enough that you could put the card in your wallet and then just put your butt up against the black box reader. Some gullible people actually believed the boxes scanned your bottom for access.
Maybe getting lucky in the sense he didn't make a buttload of cash. But RFID is going to be huge within 5 years. And when they can be printed in large quantities, it's going to be a booming industry.
He was a visionary, perhaps, and like many the result of being way ahead of your time is a rather thin wallet.
Presently here, but not there.
"what part of a proximity card with incorporated PIN code isn't so obvious and apparent to the average engineer that it should qualify for a patent?"
The implementation.
"Derp de derp."
My thoughts exactly. A multibillion dollar industry is held up for twenty years with a technology that likely would have been invented anyhow - and I'm supposed to think patents are good for humanity? Sheesh, even the inventor has likley lost more than 3mil in opportunity costs.
Umpteen morons have posted so far claiming, without benefit of evidence, that RFID has only recently begun to be widely implemented because the patent expired. Baloney!
Even the briefist of Google searches will show you that RFID implementation has been bogged down by 2 factors: sufficiently cheap manufacturing techniques and industry-wide standards for implementation / data encoding / frequency usage. It took bar codes decades to become ubiquitous, in part because of the same need for standard data dsecriptions that allow every product by every manufacturer to be given a unique bar code.
See Frontline, and CSEMag.com, just to pick 2.
The fact that this was patented had nothing to do with its lack of widespread use. Get a grip, people!
To the Walton's of Walmart fame? If so, maybe that explains why they're so into the RFID thing?
Is there any chance that someone will sell a small and inexpensive gizmo that will let you know if something is tagged?
I can sort of imagine taking one to the store, so I can avoid buying clothing that's trackable.
Well, firstly: there are a lot of stupid inventions (e.g.: hat that spreads into an umbrella).
Secondly: there are a lot of inventions that are developed based on previous ideas and are fully exploited (e.g.: paperclips - there are many designs, quite a few still being used).
Thirdly: many inventions are innovative, but just not quite good enough to use (e.g.: the development of the zipper took several tries).
Fourthly: The technology is often not good/economical enough in practice (e.g. Lilienfeld's invention of the field effect transistor in 1925 (patented in 1930).
Finally: some inventions are so far advanced for the time that no one (other than the inventor) sees any realistic use for it (e.g. Babbage's analytical engine)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I'm impressed that he got his first patent when he was 52 years old.
;-)
There's hope for me yet! (And I promise to only use my patents for good.)
-- Alastair
When Disney was faced with losing its copyrighted Mickey Mouse cash cow to the public domain, they managed (or so it seems) to get the law changed at the 11th hour to extend their control.
What happens when an IBM or GE invents something that doesn't become ubiquitous/profitable until near the end of it's patented life? Can they/have they also bought legislation? Or is entertainment the only industry where that happens?
Yes, I'm wearing a tin foil hat... but recent events ought to convince anybody that the interests of corporations and the public aren't so well balanced these days. I'm just curious what happens when a large corp instead of an individual is in this situation.
"Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" - George W. Bush Nov. 2005
If it was so obvious how come *you* didn't invent it?
Where's your webpage where you talked how your cool new idea a few years ago when he applied for this patent?
Oh yeah, that's right, you didn't invent it, didn't think of it, didn't discuss it, don't know anyone who did, you're useless to society while this guy is creating and inventing.
I don't like the idea of RFID because I'm certain that for every good use some jackass will find 10 evil uses but the guy deserves credit for his invention.
The implementation.
Which is just what doesn't have to be described in a patent filing.
Shockingly, yes. It is called an "RFID Reader"!!!!
Imagine that! A device to *READ* all those billions of *READ-ONLY* RFID tags that will be out there!
Who woulda thunk it?
Technically Tesla invented both Radio and Wireless power supplies. Does that make Charles Walton Telsa's son?
Because, my non-inventing anti-patent give-me-something-for-nothing friend, if you had done 5 seconds of research, you would know that it is only recently that the manufacturing technology to make RFIDs cheap enough to be economically viable for large scale use has only recently been invented.
You can take off your "hah! gotcha!" tinfoil hat and slip your "dunce hat" on for the rest of the day.
"Which is just what doesn't have to be described in a patent filing."
That is not true. You have to be able to prove that it works. I can't patent time travel until I modify a Delorean.
"Derp de derp."
The basic idea is used by IFF (indentify friend or foe) and trnasponder devices used in aircraft. Whack 'em with radar and they output a pattern of radar signals that can be detected and decoded (or even viewed as extra returns on the radr screen)
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think I follow your line of reasoning, but I'd like to elaborate because I think this indicates a change in attitude that gets at the root of something that's been bothering me for some time.
I'll readily admit that we do not have an ideal system in place, but then, no system has ever been ideal, right? We define the ideals in order to give us a navigation point around which real actions move and against which results can be judged.
It seems that we've recently been more apt to take the easy road in our approach to law. Politicians are supposed to be our leaders. They should be making hard decisions that may not be what their citizens believe. The great leaders are able to make those hard decisions for us and not worry about reelection, how history will look at them, or how much money they'll make on the lecture circuit after they retire (see Lincoln, Hoover, Lugar, and sorry... not Reagan, Bush, Clinton, or Bush). Simplistic, I know, but RFID is a prime example of far reaching technology that may take of in a major way without anyone slowing it down and really examining if it's worth it to allow business this much information/control of our citizens
Business/Consumer desire should not dictate public policy. We already have documents that are guidelines for how laws are constructed. If we can't figure out what to do with these new technologies, then it's time to get some smart people together to figure out how these things are going to affect the long term and get those documents/books updated. Public policy should never be based on how decisions will affect the economy next quarter.
Get real, there are a few good things that come with rfids:
- lower cost of manufacturing / transport,
- greater safety in medical processes (including surgery and drugs dispensing),
- lower maintenance costs of complex systems and installations,
- better safety on the road (signs can carry a message that displays in your car the moment you pass it),
- more acurate navigation,
etc.
Can rfid tags be used for bad things? Yes. But so can things we love: knives, dynamite and box cutters. Have fun.
Charles Walton's campaign donations since 1993
... fellow neo-geezer. Not to be ageist about it, but sometimes I think you just need to put some miles on before "ohhh! new and shiny! must be good!" can be tempered with "I've seen this smoke and mirrors razzle dazzle before....".
... whatever is coming, is the RFID tags in YOU. And it will be forced, mandated, after a suitable time span of voluntary for the general public and mandated for like military/cops, etc. And even then you'll see people saying how cool it is.
And what everyone won't admit yet, but sure as
I am more pessimistic than you on the time span, I think the real bogus stuff is coming a lot sooner.
The other bad thing about using this and other intrusive technology is that inside the criminal justice "system" they are chronic serial liars more often than not, and only occassionally does the truth come out. Tell ya whut, there are few things scarier than to be standing in a courtroom, facing 20 years hard time, and have das authorities get up and testify to a complete lie, something they know is a lie, based on them flaunting their "technology" expertise in order to influence the judge and jury.
spooky stuff
RFID, what is here now and possible within a few years = a few good advantages,some of the quite good, and hundreds of disadvantages, some of them so bad they could be classified as near demonic.
I'd say he had a pretty good run. 3 million from one idea?
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Corporations will do the same thing they did with RFID tags. Wait until the patent expires...then exploit it. Of course if this guy makes another 3 mil, who cares.
I still don't understand how you can base the life of your company on a device that operates under Part15 of the FCC rules.
Lets say you run a business using a device that runs under part15. Then Joe Joes Auto Wrecker buys a licensed radio system on the same frequency. Your business is shut down with no recourse (SP?).
This same thing happens with WIFI networks under part15. One day your network is fine, supporting hundreds of users, then one guy with a license moves in the area and your entire company network is done for. You can't even complain.
We need to take a hard look at our spectrum use, part15 should be used for emerging technologies.
here we go again.... some lame-o slashdotters who can't invent anything to save themselves are complaining that a truly inventive person has received a patent (which is expired).
get over it. stop complaining. you all expect inventions and intellectual property to be free. well go wank off to RMS as I'm sure he expects you to.
I am a patent attorney. I create monopolies. You can fight the system, but you will be crushed in the end. I act for many multi-nationals and start up IT companies. Get over it. You infringe one of the patents I have drafted, and its game over.
Its just business, nothing personal.
From your friendly patent attorney.
Unfortunately, what I really need to do all this is a kit with say...50 RFID chips with an adhesive backing, scanners that I can place around the house to track them/count them, and software for my Windows computer which lets me easily monitor/setup this whole system.
I would be willing to pay $$$ to anybody who could make this possible.
*end Joe Consumer*
Ok, the whole point of that little letter was to show that there would be a large demand for these if it was dumbed down enough for Joe Consumer. It needs simple software to set up the RFID chips and manage/monitor them, and the chips and scanners need to be positioned as simple appliances that are simple to install wherever you need it around the house.
If something like this exists, please tell me where to find it, if not, for the love of god would someone who knows this technology please make it? You'd make a killing.
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correct, *but* the fact that this technology exists, that we or other people use / abuse it, means we should enter into reasoned debate about what we consider appropriate and responsible use. To absolve ourselves of any responsibility for the technology we create, and not enter into moral debates over good and bad usage is foolish at best and dangerous at worst. I am sure most slashdotters will have opinions over who should have 'open source' and 'free' access to nuclear weapons technology, for example (USA? North Korea? al-Quaeda? Mickey Mouse?)
Does this make CowboyNeal the father of RTFA?
Actually, 83-year-old women far outnumber 83-year-old men, so unless he's only interested in younger women, he'll have to beat them off with a stick.
This is because the average life span of a man is significantly lower than a woman's (72 years compared with 78 years, I believe), so the older the age group, the greater percentage of women.
Men are apparently hot commodities in the 70+ age group, with all those widows.
You tell me. The idea is obvious but the implementation might not be.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.