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IP-Based Location Determination Patented

Posted by timothy on from the get-up-get-get-get-down dept.

little1973 writes "Digital Envoy recived patent 6,757,740 for determining, collecting and using geographic locations of Internet users. I didn't know a patent could be obtained for a simple traceroute and some lookups in a DB." The patent talks about a bit more than this (such as assigning confidence levels to bits of the looked-up information), but the long list of referenced previous patents reminds me of the saying "If you copy one person, it's plagiarism; if you copy a dozen, it's research."

6 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Prior art by BillyBlaze · · Score: 3, Informative
    First Google hit: http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm

    That one has a database, but it doesn't rely on whois data, so it may not infringe the patent. Trying again...

    http://www.visualware.com/personal/products/visual route/index.html

    Click on live trial and give your email. It seems almost identical to the patent - it runs a traceroute and figures out where each hop is. I have no idea how old it is, or whether it's related to Digital Envoy, though.

  2. Re:Prior art by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Can't find one at the moment, but this is definitely not new.

    The priority date of the original filing is back in 1999 so you have to find prior art before that.

  3. Prior Art by Metasquares · · Score: 3, Informative

    There were at least two systems set up that did this beforehand: IP2Geo and Net2Geo. I did all sorts of research on this because I'm very close to releasing an application that looks up geographic information based upon IP.

  4. Re:Surfer, Map Thyself! by Motherfucking+Shit · · Score: 3, Informative
    There's some guy who has that link in his sig, it links to his own geo-location thingo. Where is he when you need him?
    I believe you're speaking of Space cowboy. His service is located at http://hostip.info. Unfortunately it's too recent to qualify as prior art for this patent.
    --
    "BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
  5. Re:Prior art - here's mine from a year+ ago .. by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 2, Informative

    Talk to the person who wrote the module, and ask him/her where they got the idea for the module... There may be prior art there yet! The module may just be the formalization of an old idea.

    --
    Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
  6. i published a paper on this in 1996 by convolvatron · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Visualizing the Global Topology of the MBone", Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, pp. 85-92, Munzner, Hoffman, Claffy, Fenner