Remember that RFID patent consortium that all the tech media were talking about earlier this year? Ever wonder what happened with that?

Mark Johnson recently wrote an update on the RFID patent consortium in the RFID Tribe News. Mark writes that it is still early days for the RFID patent consortium. So far there has been some organizing work, but not much else.

Once the consortium is organized, however, the patent pool should make it easier for manufacturers of RFID products (readers, etc.) to license technology to incorporate into their products. According to Mark's article:

[T]he "most efficient" licensing structure for the RFID industry is a place to obtain a single license for all the patents associated with a given standard. This saves transactional costs associated with negotiating with several firms and paying multiple license fees to use a technology. To achieve that most efficient structure requires that all of the patent holders for the technologies required to implement the RFID UHF standard would be a part of the RFID Consortium. Horn indicated that 100 percent participation is a goal but is not always possible. He has seldom seen any patent pool obtain all the patents for a given standard.

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License fees for the RFID Consortium have not been set. Horn commented that the license fees will be non-exclusive -- the market retains the right to negotiate bilaterally with any of the firms in the patent pool for rights to use that firm's technology. But most equipment providers who want to license the applicable RFID technologies will recognize the efficiency of licensing from the RFID Consortium's patent pool.

Obviously, the patent consortium is of keen interest to RFID equipment manufacturers.

As to what this all means to the average end-user company that simply wants to deploy RFID in the supply chain or in some other kind of use, this article does not answer the question. For insights into that particular question, check out my earlier post "RFID Patents -- Taking Steps to Protect Your Company."