The past and present of the new four great inventions

The predecessor of the QR code was the bar code. In 1949, barcode payments were introduced. A barcode can be regarded as a symbol for machine recognition, similar to the way people rely on letters and numbers to identify information. For machines as well, an optical symbol that allows them to recognize things is needed, and that is the barcode. June 26, 1974, is a day that deserves to be recorded in history. At a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, the United States, the world’s first product with a barcode was sold – Arrow gum. This product is now on display in a museum in the United States. As barcodes became widely used in the 1970s and 1980s, large retailers also began to adopt scanners, which enabled them to manage customer databases and membership cards.

The most typical representative of these is Walmart. By tracking and automating inventory, Walmart can deliver goods more promptly, which makes it more attractive, and it also reduces the costs of various products. Thanks to barcodes, operations with complex logistics become easier. The ultimate manifestation of this fact was in 1988, when discount department store Walmart decided to introduce a bar code system for selling food. Now, every day, barcodes are scanned 8 billion times. In China, across the entire logistics and retail supply chain, barcodes help save 300 billion yuan in costs each year.

A QR code is an “upgraded version” of a bar code. A QR code is equivalent to stacking multiple bar codes on top of each other; it can store information in both horizontal and vertical directions, which gives it a greater capacity for storing information compared to regular bar codes. The QR code contains 219 characters, but the icon is small, thereby enabling the storage of more information within a relatively small area. When QR codes were first introduced, they did not receive much attention in Japan. Although the inventor of QR codes applied for a patent at the time, he failed to see the business opportunities inherent in them, so he voluntarily gave up the rights to use them. The QR code was thus set aside.

Unexpectedly, it was a Chinese person who discovered the huge market value of QR codes; this person is Wang Yue, the founder of Yirui Xinchuang Company. By 2001, 25-year-old Wang Yue had already reached the position of technical director at a Japanese software company. In the Japanese workplace, this is a great form of recognition. But before that, Wang Yue went through a long period of disappointment and waiting. He didn’t expect that after coming to Japan to apply for a software engineer position, he would be assigned to a factory, and from there he was directly placed in the warehouse. He felt very unsettled; “he didn’t know when it was the beginning, and no one recognized it, nor was there anyone he could ask.” ”After working in Japan for over a year and coming into contact with QR codes, Wang Yue spent 15 days thinking before deciding to return to his home country to start a business.

In 2002, Wang Yue founded Yirui Company and, together with a group of outstanding engineers graduated from Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Harbin Institute of Technology, developed the world’s first mobile phone QR code engine； In 2003, it developed the \"QR code rapid reading engine\" with complete independent intellectual property rights, and filed a **patent** for the barcode reading method and device ； In 2005, it also participated in the development of China’s QR code standard, which has now become an ISO international standard. Today, QR code payment has profoundly impacted every aspect of people’s lives in China. According to public data, the market size of mobile payments in China reached 5.5 trillion dollars in 2016 ； According to data from Forrest Research, the scale of mobile payments in the United States throughout 2016 was only 112 billion dollars. The British Financial Times believes that “China’s success in the new economy and cutting-edge technologies gives the Chinese reason to be proud.”

Seeing the tremendous changes that QR codes have brought to social life, as well as the endless business opportunities they present, the original inventors of QR codes could remain idle no longer. On January 26, 2018, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported that Alipay, which is used by the vast majority of Chinese people, would be fully available in Japan in 2018. But soon after, there were voices saying that the QR code technology was invented by the Japanese, and that Japan intended to reassert its rights to the patent profits from it, seeking to charge each Chinese person 1 cent. Based on the huge volume of use in the market, this will mean immeasurable patent royalties. But in fact, this might just be the Japanese side’s wishful thinking. As early as 2011, Xu Wei, the founder of Lingkong Network, applied for a patent for the \"QR code scanning\" function, and subsequently obtained patent rights for QR code scanning technology in regions such as China, the United States, Japan, and the European Union. In other words, the Chinese do not commit any infringement in the field of product QR code services.

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