Bluetooth royalities for distribution
Posted: Tue May 02, 2017 4:12 pm
by emax07
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?
Re: Bluetooth royalities for distribution
Posted: Wed May 03, 2017 3:25 am
by WiFive
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.
Re: Bluetooth royalities for distribution
Posted: Thu May 04, 2017 11:30 pm
by stuartc
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