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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 $3 million from royalties coming from his patents. Unfortunately for him, his latest patent about RFID expired in the mid-1990s. So he will not make any money from the billions of RFID tags that will appear in the years to come. But he continues to invent and his latest patent about a proximity card with incorporated PIN code protection was granted in June 2004. Maybe he'll be luckier with this one. This overview contains some excerpts of the original article. It also contains tips to search for Walton's patents and an image of the front page of his first patent."
Frankly, this is one patent that wouldn't bother me had it not expired.
Were licensing fees prohibitive for mass-scale introduction of RFID tags, personal privacy would be safer.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Maybe he'll be luckier with this one.
At 83, I don't think he is really that interested in the monetary aspects of the invention process.
This is why we have patents, everyone is just so used to predatory patents nowadays that someone not making money hand-over-fist from a patent seems strange.
He made three million dollars. I should be 1/2 as lucky as him..... sheesh
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Slightly off topics, but the poor ($ 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ahhh ... that's where you're neglecting a key piece of information. For capitalism to work as per the definition of capitalism, consumers must be "perfectly informed". Companies have a vested interest in keeping the consumer under-informed when it comes to RFID. The solution is for the government to mandate a warning tag like the warnings on cigarette boxes. Then capitalism would decide if RFID lives or dies. Something like, "WARNING: This product contains an chip that publically broadcasts your private usage of this product.". Anyhow, I've got a microwave, nothing 15 seconds in there won't fix.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
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.
There are lots of things like this that RFID would be good for... imagine being able to tell the position of you golf ball without having to go looking around for it, or a way to go to a driving range with your OWN balls and get them all back at the end of the day...
Bowling alleys do their get a strike when the head (#1) pin is a different color... they could use RFID so they can accurately track it and set off some reminder so the person knows to collect on their free game and so people don't try to scam the bowling alley out of free games.
Places that rent equipment could actually use decent stuff without having to worry about it walking out. Since the tag is embedded, people wouldn't be able to just yank it off without destroying the intrinsic value of the piece of equipment itself. And the rental place could do an inventory with just a quick wave of a sensor through their shelves. Imagine an ice rink system where blade sharpenings are tracked by RFID and they can go at a moment's notice and pick up any skates that have not had their blades sharpened in 15 days and sharpen them, scan them, and put them back on the shelf. Then, if someone brought back a pair that they said were dull, the counter-biscuit could use a computer to find the theoretically sharpest pair available in a given size.
Slot car racing could be tracked more closely to determine a real winner. Set the RFID in the same relative location in each car (front bumper?) and then track when it crosses a certain point... It should be very easy with simple triangulation. Using that same technology, you could record the entire race and then play it back using a renderer to let racers watch their driving from a cockpit view!
Hell, any sport where tracking the location of an object would be valuable would benefit. Ping pong, shuffleboard (the table-top variety), air hockey... You can make sure people aren't cheating and verify the actions that take place down to the nanometer if you configure your sensors accurately enough.
I'm sure there are other great uses for RFID tags.. prisons. I'd sure love it if they could put an RFID tag in every inbound prisoner and deactivate it permanently when the prisoner leaves. They could know, at a moment's notice, if a prisoner was somewhere they weren't supposed to be. Pets are already implanted with RFID tags to positively identify them if they are found. Military personnel could be implanted with RFID tags and any heat signature that did not correspond with an appropriate RFID signature could be immediately investigated for trespassers/spies... of course, it would have to be deactivated once active service had been terminated...
Think of all the positive uses. RFID is not an EVIL technology. It has some evil applications, tracking purchasing habits, etc... but saying that it is evil in and of itself is about as intelligent as saying that guns are evil.
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.
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.
A patent all depends on how broad you make the claims, but the first thing I thought of is the aircraft IFF [dean-boys.com] (identification friend or foe) transponder which dates back to WWar II. A radio signal is sent out to an aircraft and an identification is returned - definitely 'rfid' on an airspace scale.
What's unique about RFID is that the responding device (ie, the RFID tag on your clothes, or your Mobil Speedpass keychain, or your FreedomPay tag) isn't self-powered. Most RFID chips have no internal power source; they get their power from the RF waves broadcast from the RFID reader. The power from the RF waves powers the RFID chip long enough for the chip to power up, and broadcast a reply to the RFID reader's query.
Now that's cool. And it's also what makes them so low-cost and useful (for good and bad). You can literally print those RFID tags; no need to include a battery.
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So you have a problem with RSA getting a patent on something that was discovered earlier and not only not disclosed, but actively hidden by the British government?? I don't
I have a problem with the fact that RSA got a patent for technology that they developed while conducting cryptographic research under a government contract! Not RSA's fault
utter rubbish
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.