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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."
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!
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
Actually, #3 isn't too big of a concern.
The RFID contains NO information other than its own ID. Anything that obtains/reads that ID still has to hook into some database that contains the list of previous actions using that ID.
So, really, the privacy issue in that regard isn't that bad.
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
In most countries, an idea has to be "not obvious to anyone appropriately skilled in the relevant art or technology" to be patentable - Does America not have such a clause, or do they not have anyone skilled in any art or technology?
The current procedure in the USPTO is to grant the patent and let someone else prove its invalid.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
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.
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!