SAN FRANCISCO, CAVia Licensing Corp., in association with the RFID Consortium, has announced a call for essential patents with respect to the air-interface standards and specifications announced by EPCglobal, Inc. and ISO/IEC for ultra-high-frequency radio-frequency identification ("UHF RFID").
An issued patent is determined to be "essential" if one or more of its claims is necessarily infringed by a product designed to practice the relevant RFID standards. The UHF RFID standards covered by this call are: the EPCglobal Air Interfaces Standards Generation 1 (Class 0, Class 0+, and Class 1) and Generation 2 (Class 1); and ISO/IEC18000-Part 6 (including Amendment 1) and the communications and interface protocols and conformance specifications referred to in those documents. An independent third-party examiner will review patents related to label and reader products for essentiality to the UHF RFID standard. Patent holders are encouraged to submit essential patents for either or both types of products.
Copies of the above referenced documents can be obtained online at www.epcglobalinc.org and www.iso.org.
Via Licensing Corp. is issuing this call for patents to identify owners of patents that are necessary for the practice of the UHF RFID standards listed above. Any entity that believes it has a granted patent that is essential to the UHF RFID standard and wishes to participate in a group of essential patent holders jointly offering to license their patents is invited to contact Via Licensing Corp. for information about how to submit patents for evaluation.
To request information on submitting patents for evaluation, entities should send an e-mail to [email protected] and specify an interest in making a submission for consideration of essentiality to the UHF RFID standard.
The deadline for submitting patents is December 1, 2006. Any company that submits a patent by this deadline which is subsequently found to be essential will be invited to join the other essential patent holders in discussing the formation of the joint licensing program.