RFID hits a bump in the road

Potentially bringing much joy to tinfoil hat-types (and, well, also legitimate privacy advocates) eager to slow the global introduction of the mark of the beast, a company called Intermec Technologies has started demanding royalties for use of a protocol related to the new standard that is being created to improve compatibility and interoperability of RFID devices (like tag readers and stuff like that). This sort of thing happens all the time in the sue-happy world of technology, but now there's some concern that with the new standard (known as Electronic Product Code Generation 2)
about to be finalized next month that everyone with a related patent is going to start demanding royalties as well,
potentially mucking up the whole process and ruining the prospects of a royalty-free standard which would have driven adoption of RFID technology. Up until this point pretty much everyone involved had been playing it cool and had agreed to donate their IP in the interests of moving things forward (we love it when big corporations get all lovey-dovey like this), so it remains to be seen whether how much this'll impede RFID's relentless march forward towards world domination.