Image: Masahiro Hara
In 1994, a Denso Wave employee named Masahiro Hara conjured up the idea of QR codes while playing the game Go. If you’ve never played Go before, it consists of a 19×19 grid with black and white stones placed throughout. One glance at a Go board will make you see the connection between QR.
Hara realized a grid system could hold much more information in a single code and could also be read from multiple directions, angles, and distances – thus speeding up production times. Hara and his Denso Wave team successfully made his vision a reality and developed the QR Code (Quick Response Code).
Denso Wave trademarked the term QR code and owns the patent rights, but does not exercise those rights, which makes the technology freely available for creation, distribution and use. QR codes are 2-D or two-dimensional, meaning that data is stored both horizontally and vertically.
Thus, despite the ubiquity, Denso Wave does not make a profit out of their brainchild. “We don't receive a commission each time it's (QR Code) used,” joked Masahiro Hara in an interview with The Guardian in 2020.
QR codes are nothing more than data embedded into an image (the QR code). As such they have no expiration date themselves. You can use them for years. But since you can encode a lot of different things in the QR code it doesn't mean the data inside it is good forever.
Source: Microsoft
Image: Masahiro Hara