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.
The goal of the RFID Consortium, which includes Avery Dennison Corp., Symbol Technologies Inc., Alien Technology, and ThingMagic Inc., among others, is to offer a convenient and cost-efficient patent-management system. In that regard, all essential RFID patents owned by members of the consortium will be made available to interested parties with a single license.
Via Licensing, a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories, is a San Francisco-based patent licensing firm that represents at least eight other patent pools including 802.11 and 802.16 wireless networking, MPEG-2 Advanced Audio Coding, and the TV-Anytime specification (in development). The RFID Consortium and Via have signed a non-binding term sheet which states that Via Licensing will manage the RFID program and work with essential patent holders under the direction of Tony McQuinn, Via's director of licensing programs and business development.
This partnership is intended to accelerate the adoption of the Gen2 RFID standard by providing a "one-stop-shop for RFID patents," Ashton says.
This article originally appeared in the November 2006 issue of Managing Automation.