Oct. 21, 2002 - On a sticky morning in early August, some 75 people, many of them lawyers in suits, gathered at the University Park Hotel@MIT, in Cambridge, Mass. They had come to discuss a potentially vexing issue facing the Auto-ID Center: patents. The meeting was called by Kevin Ashton, the center's executive director, to discuss what, if anything, should be done to try to prevent patent infringement lawsuits from inhibiting the adoption of the center's technology.

IP meeting at MIT

A quick search of the United States Patent Office's database turns up 595 patents issued between 1996 and 2002 and another 386 pending. And those are just U.S. patents with the abbreviation RFID in them. There could be other relevant patents that have been issued in other regions. Many of those patents probably aren't worth the paper they are written on, but some could potentially relate to the technology being developed by the Auto-ID Center.

Ashton presented a paper, "Towards an Approach to 'Intellectual Property'" to foster discussion. The paper focused mainly on RFID patents, but the Auto-ID Center's system also includes other technical areas, including digital signal processing, computer networking and computer software.

Ashton's concern was that if there were a spate of lawsuits as companies began adopting the electronic product code (EPC) and associated infrastructure, then funding for vendors would dry up. Potential customers would be reluctant to invest in the technology, and all the potential benefits to users, vendors, investors, and the economy as a whole would be lost. In short, the fragile emerging market for the center's RFID technology could collapse under the weight of the suits.