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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff Posted on Wednesday, October 25, 2006 12:03:00 AM Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox    | Abstract: | The RFID Consortium has hired Via Licensing Corp. to administer its UHF RFID licensing program. The consortium's expanding partnership with Via is intended to accelerate the adoption of the Gen2 RFID standard by providing a "one-stop-shop for RFID patents." |
| Keywords: | RFID, RFID Consortium, EPCglobal Gen2, UHF, Intermec Technologies, Rapid Start, Avery Dennison Corp., Symbol Technologies Inc., Alien Technology, ThingMagic Inc. |
It was over a year ago that the RFID Consortium, a group of vendors dedicated to sharing intellectual property and simplifying the licensing of RFID technology, announced it would establish a patent pool to support the EPCglobal Gen2 standards. Now, the group of about two dozen members has hired Via Licensing Corp. as the administrator of the ultra high frequency (UHF) RFID licensing program. It was the logical next step, says Kevin Ashton, vice president of marketing for ThingMagic, a consortium member. "There's a right way to form a patent corporation, and the first thing to do is find a good patent administrator, which we did," he said in an interview. The next step is to determine which patents are necessary to ensure that RFID is implemented in a commercially viable way. This requires an independent expert to assess the patents that have been submitted, and, if the need exists, inviting other patent holders to be a part of the pool. So far, however, there's at least one holdout when it comes to participation in the pool -- Intermec Technologies, which has been fiercely protecting its intellectual property since the inception of the Gen1 standard. To that end, Intermec formed its own pool of sorts, called Rapid Start, a program that allows it to control licensing of its 145 RFID-based patents. [Click to continue] |
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