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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 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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.