Glossary
Denso Wave
Denso Wave is the Japanese company that invented the QR code in 1994, and it holds the patents. It chose not to enforce them for use of the standardised format, which is why QR codes are free for everyone to generate and read.
The origin
Developed by a team led by Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave, a Toyota Group subsidiary, to track automotive parts. Existing barcodes held too little data and had to be scanned in the right orientation. The 1:1:3:1:1 finder ratio was chosen after surveying printed materials for the pattern least likely to occur by accident.
The licensing decision
Denso Wave holds patents on QR technology but declared it would not exercise them against users of the ISO-standardised format. That decision is why QR codes became ubiquitous while comparable proprietary 2D codes did not.
"QR Code" is a registered trademark of Denso Wave. Using the format is free; using the name as your product's brand is a trademark question.
What is not free
Some proprietary variants — SQRC (encrypted), FrameQR (design-oriented) — are licensed products. The standard QR code described in ISO/IEC 18004 is not.
Related
- ISO/IEC 18004 — ISO/IEC 18004 is the international standard defining QR codes: symbol structure, encoding, error correction, masking and decoding. It is the authoritative…
- Static QR code — A static QR code contains its destination directly in the pattern. It cannot be edited or tracked, and it never expires — because nothing has to keep…
- Micro QR code — Micro QR is a smaller variant defined in the same standard, ranging from 11 × 11 to 17 × 17 modules with a single finder pattern and a two-module quiet…