Bluetooth royalities for distribution

emax07
Posts: 0
Joined: Tue May 02, 2017 3:55 pm

Bluetooth royalities for distribution

Postby emax07 » Tue May 02, 2017 4:12 pm

Hello,
I would like to sell a product that uses the esp32 with the bluetooth.
Should I have pay the bluetooth royalty or is it already paid by the ExpressIf?

WiFive
Posts: 3529
Joined: Tue Dec 01, 2015 7:35 am

Re: Bluetooth royalities for distribution

Postby WiFive » Wed May 03, 2017 3:25 am

I don't think you have to pay a royalty but you do have to join the SIG and pay the listing and testing fees which is a very annoying/prohibitive for small run products. Especially since they eliminated the module certification reuse. So you could end up adding $10+/unit to the price of your 1000 units. And you still have to compete on price with the products that completely ignore this due to IP enforcement in their jurisdiction. There is some grey area where you could possibly never mention any of the Bluetooth trademarks and say "smartphone compatible" and claim certain IP rights are tied to chips and go unnoticed or have lawyers fighting over it for years.

stuartc
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Feb 28, 2017 11:07 am

Re: Bluetooth royalities for distribution

Postby stuartc » Thu May 04, 2017 11:30 pm

Yes you *should* pay:

https://www.bluetooth.com/develop-with- ... sting-fees

Bluetooth SIG membership is free. You should 'declare' your product; I don't think 'qualification' is needed because it's the ESP32 module that you're using, not your own design. That's $2,500 if you're a small (<$1M) company.

Whether you call this a royalty or not is up to you, but you pay to declare your product so you can call it a Bluetooth device. You also have to fill in a bunch of information. There is a video!

https://www.bluetooth.com/develop-with- ... ur-product

-Stuart

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