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Intermec Claims RFID is Proprietary
seeks2know writes "Line56.com reports that Intermec is claiming patents on RFID chips, readers, and tags. They have launched their first lawsuit against Matrics. They seek to sell licenses to all RFID manufacturers. Erik Michielsen of ABI Research states '...this definitely clouds the UHF Generation 2 standards discussions and is fueling considerable animosity in the industry.'
Interestingly, the patents that Intermec is claiming were acquired in their acquisition of IBM's RFID laboratory in December, 1997. Another case of a submarine patent strategy?"
how various luminaries react to this. I'd like to hear Stallman's take on this.
If this patent is valid, and Intermec raises the license fees high enough, it could kill RFID before the technology has really come into its own. What side will CASPIAN come down on? Will IBM stand idly by and let this happen? Will other tinfoil-hat-wearing consumer groups seize on this patent, or try to buy it outright to effectively halt the implementation of RFID?
This has the potential to fracture EFF and PubPat too, seeing as the privacy nuts will be all for anything that makes it harder or more expensive for RFID to become ubiquitous, but this sounds like a job for PubPat (or some other private entitiy) to investigate, to protect the very real benefits that RFID will bring to supply chain management.
or will this be a case where the Feds stand up to fight against a technology patent, now that the DOD has declared that all if its suppliers must use RFID by Jan 1 2005? Can the government claim eminent domain over patents or other IP? This page seems to address the question, but doesn't give me a clear enough picture of the consequences for suppliers when government takes an "eminent domain" license... and it kind of leaves me thinking that if Intermec sues the goverment, and the patent isn't invalidated, taxpayers will be left holding the bag twice.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
Saying "oh, it'll be a drop in the bucket for walmart because they're so big" is not terribly insightful- in fact, it's downright asinine.
Funny thing about licensing fees- they're often per-item, or based on the size(er, wealth) of the victim(er, licensee). It could very well cost Walmart hundreds of millions of dollars over a couple years...in which case, you can damn well bet they'll spend a [few] million to fight it.
Please help metamoderate.
This is the best news I've heard all day.
I can't believe it, here on Slashdot everyone (myself included) is applauding the predatory use of patents because for once it can help advance the common good.
Mark this day on your calandars, it's one to remember.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Wait, if RFID chips are being put in money, and they are patented...
can intermec claim they deserve royalties on money?!?
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Now someone can place a toll boothe for the use of an international standard, and despite the fact they probably did not contribute to that, then do you blame them for doing so?
Okay, this is just a hobby horse of mine, so excuse me while I gallop around for a while. Please note that I'm not accusing you of making this mistake, it's just one possible reading of your statement. I've seen this problem before on /., and you brought it up, so....
When a portfolio company purchases patents from an R&D company they are contributing. In a very similar vein to putting up cash for research.
See, you do research and it costs money. One of the ways you can defray the cost of research that doesn't lead to where you're going (dead end for your purposes) is to sell what you've got. Hopefully it will cover your expenses, and you'll be no worse for wear, and can continue your research.
If there was no one willing to buy your dead end, you would have to eat the cost - ie lose the investment. This makes people who would invest in you nervous, and makes them stick to mainstream research. It also makes it a much bigger risk to sink your own money into your research, as you can get stuck halfway, and that sucks.
Now, these patent portfolio groups buy these patents in the hope that some of them will be useful or salable in turn, just like investing in real estate. These houses often drive further development, in fact, as they want people to use their tech so they try to introduce people to it.
Many ideas and well-developed inventions would go completely unknown if not for people pushing them.
As for the law suit part of things...if they're filing a patent suit, then things are serious. I happen to know that patent lawsuits start in the $0.5 million range to prosecute, and then they start getting expensive. And it may be years before you see anything.
Now, caveat: when the patent is over something that was obvious when it was invented, or is on an idea rather than an implementation, I'm with you: it's stupid, and it should be invalidated.
My point is that purchasing a patent is contributing to it.
We have been using RFID at work for parts tracking in production since 1994. Would this be "Prior art"???
I had a meeting today with reps from NCR, who hope to be a big reseller/implementer of RFID solutions, and the salesman basically said that, yes, the first $50,000 you spend will be wasted.
The (economic) reason for this is that the technology is seriously underdeveloped and encumbered by IP claims just like this. But that's not stopping Walmart, Target, and a host of others from requiring manufacturers to participate in pilot programs to force manufacturers and retailers to implement the technology and work out the bugs. Walmart is requiring its top 10 vendors to ship all product to one of its DCs with RFID labels on cases and pallets this January; Target is requiring the same thing for selected vendors by July 2005.
So companies like my employer will have to spend $5-10,000/printer, and $0.50/label (on products we sell for $10), which is pure expense for us, for printers that will need to be replaced in a year to handle new standards, and labels that fail 20% of the time. Oh, and the fastest printing rate they've got is 2-4 inches/minute, which is half what we print at now.
The only way we can hope to recover these expenses (since retailers laugh at us when we say that we need to raise prices to cover expenses they're forcing us to incur) is to start transitioning our own inventory management system to RFID in order to improve efficiency and save money.
Was it this bad when Walmart forced the adoption of UPCs on everyone?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
As someone pointed out, IBM is no stranger to 'being stupid.' However, without knowing the sums involved, this sale seems to have worked out well for them -- they got some revenue, and avoided hanging on to a conflict of interest themselves.
Given their Linux strategy (which admittedly wasn't very thought-out in 1997, so this was probably just serendipity), and the fallout from the holocaust revelations, hanging on to an RFID card would've made the company's image uncomfortably 'evil.' Plus, IBM is simply too big to easily swing a patent like this -- people know how to do patent searches, and if there were even a chance IBM would try to collect revenue on it, a new consortium would've appeared to push a freer standard. Like Microsoft, they're often stuck filing more for their own protection than for actual profit. The smaller fish, in turn, *can* slip under the "sonar," so they're going to try to extract value from it IBM couldn't have leveraged, and hopefully paid well enough for the privilege.
Ironically, I'm typing this on an IBM M-Pro from around 1998 or so, which includes a RFID 'asset tag' in its construction. Thankfully, the BIOS does allow disabling it; it was more to ease the 'Where's the machine on this pallet supposed to go?/What's this machine have in it, and who spilled coffee in the CD-ROM before we gave it to Bob?' questions than to actively prevent or track theft.
rolling in dough from the royalties under such "just compensation"?
exactly. but this isn't about gaining a decisive tactical advantage used to win a freaking war, it's about shiny new inventory managment software packages and logistics systems. Do you really want your tax dollars to make Intermec rich, just so Don Rumsfeld can pull up a database and tell you EXACTLY how many bullets are in the munitions bunker at Fort Bragg at any given time, and where each of those bullets came from, and when they were manufactured, and which truck delievered them, and which shelf they are sitting on now?
'Cos I don't. Seems like a huge waste of money to me in the first place, but then I'm not trying to run the DoD. My point is, DoD is going to do this, and they're going to spend money contributed by you and me in our taxes to make it happen. From this perspective, Intermec is making a shameless bid to steal money out of my pocket, and we should hope that their claims don't stand up in the interest of federal fiscal responsibility (now there's an oxymoron for you).
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
All pharmaceutical companies. The cost to develop a single drug, from initial research through final FDA testing, averages slightly under $1 billion. Those costs simply cannot be recouped if you're immediately competing against generics from companies that didn't have to pay for the research or testing.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
the generics would still have to reverse engineer it, and it would be a lot harder without the patent details. Not impossible, but certainly harder. innovations without a patent going into production would have to rely on obscurity for security, and society would adjust to it. Demand for the products in general terms would dictate it. Look at what is still produced that is out of patent now.
There's no good solution to this patenting problem. Our society has let it get too complex, and allows patents for insanely trivial little deviations from a general idea. We can abandon patents, or institute profound changes in what is considered actually "new". If it's merely marginally improved, no patent. That's the closest I can see to any sort of reform with the system. Well, that and outlaw intangibile products as patentable.
Yes and no. They'll still know the "active ingredient" in a drug; it's just a matter of coming up with a cost-effective synthesis process. They already have to develop their own filler, which is the only thing that distinguishes generics from the brand-name drug. That's only a tiny fraction of what goes into the original drug development.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
"Submarine Patents"? Keeping them secret?
It's the PATENT OFFICE's JOB to make sure, when a patent is filed, it's not a copy of another. Likewise, if you intend to try and make something, invent something, or use something as a standard, it's YOUR job to do the research and ensure that you're not infringing on someone's patents! Finally, you must ACTIVELY enforce your patent rights! RFID tags have been used for the last 20 years in manufacturing environments to monitor pallet movements, create build recipes, monitor what goods in the manufacturing line have what parts, have gone into repair bays, etc etc.
Greed killed it. I hope!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
if you work at intermec, can you tell use
where we can buy one of the rfid pc cards
and a few tags? maybe at an affordable rate?
and is there a linux driver available, and/or
enough documentation to write one?
Your chronology is wrong - Amtech bought the stuff from IBM. Intermec then bought Amtech - you don't know what you are talking about - I do!!!
We have put a lot of time and money into R&D and want to protect that investment.
No, you've put a lot of money into acquiring other people's R&D. I have little sympathy for companies that try to profit from other's research. In my ideal world, patents exist, but they aren't transferrable - not even to the inventor's company.