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."

Comments

Patents and Privacy

[Webmoth]

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.

Re:Patents and Privacy

[guido1]

Were licensing fees prohibitive for mass-scale introduction of RFID tags, personal privacy would be safer.

What would the patent holder have gained by making them prohibitive? Had his patent not expired, the only difference is he would have been richer. I'm sure the technology would still have been used... (Unless this guy is truly altruistic.)

Time to get lucky

[lockefire]

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.

Maybe that's WHY they are in widespread use...

[greenfly]

It seems to me that maybe one of the reasons RFID tags are in such widespread use now is the fact that the patent did expire so other companies were free to implement their own uses for it. He got $3 million, which isn't bad, and now it goes into the public domain, as it should.

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.

Re:Maybe that's WHY they are in widespread use...

[garcia]

It seems to me that maybe one of the reasons RFID tags are in such widespread use now is the fact that the patent did expire so other companies were free to implement their own uses for it.

Nah, they are in widespread use because there is now more technology to read them. People are less aware and disgusted by intrusive technology (some even think it's fucking good for them -- ooh, but the ones inbedded in tires will make our roads safer w/o us having to actually have real police out there patroling!)

The only way that the public will revolt against instrusive technologies is if it somehow keeps them from watching Survivor.

RSA made little money, as well...

[GPLDAN]

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!"

Re:privacy, schmivacy

[molarmass192]

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.