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.

His famous quote from when RFID was first used

[Anonymous Coward]

"I am become death, the tracker of products."

We can't put the genie back in the bottle.

at 83, money is more important than luck

[John_Sauter]

At 83, I don't think he is really that interested in the monetary aspects of the invention process.

I beg to disagree. As you get older, the cost of female companionship goes up.
nbsp; John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)

I Seriously Doubt That Man Invented the RFID

[John_Booty]

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!

privacy, schmivacy

[surreal-maitland]

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.

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.

Disc Golf

[Squareball]

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.

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!"

wouldn't make a difference

[John Harrison]

The cost of making the antenna is the largest factor in the price of the simplest RFID tags. The industry is pretty close to the elusive 5 cent tag, which has been the holy grail for some time. It is improved technology (as opposed to expiring patents) that has lead to the reduction in cost over time.

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.

Delay in RFID NOT due to patent

[PatHMV]

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!