IP-Based Location Determination Patented

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."

Comments

Re:Prior art

[BillyBlaze]

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.

Re:Prior art

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Re:Prior art

[vsync64]

What, like xtraceroute?

First public release! (8-May-01998)

It works!

[Smallpond]

I traced a spammer to his exact location using the information provided in the database:

1060 W. Addison St.
Chicago, Illinois

Re:Prior art - here's mine from a year+ ago ..

[xmas2003]

I've had a IP to location tool on my personal web site for over a year - it uses one of the more simpler ways of determining location (use the Perl Module Geo::IPfree ... looks like the 0.1 release for that was 2002) so does this mean that my use of that module means I'm in violation of the patent ... or is the Perl Module itself in violation?

Prior Art

[Metasquares]

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.

Re:Surfer, Map Thyself!

[Motherfucking Shit]

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.

Re:Prior art - here's mine from a year+ ago ..

[Stephen Samuel]

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.

it certainly seems like....

[zogger]

...anyone trying to determine anything relating to the internet and IP addresses, would have to notice there are things called DNS and search engines activated by keyword search algorithyms. This, a clever lawyer might say, is "publication in a peer journal", if it can be proven that the search terms would lead to the prior art site readily. If it's published on the web, it's published. If it's easily found, it's easily found. The web contains your peers as a subset of everyone. You have to search in a brticks and mortar library, either by actually looking here and there, or using a card catalog, or a microfoche catalog and slides, and so forth. Searching is searching.

Need to bust these bogus patents. Need to bust up IP patents in general, take it back to tangibles only.

Interesting trivia, when was the first non tangible patent issued, and what was it, and why was it issued?

I don't know, just wondering.

i published a paper on this in 1996

[convolvatron]

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