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Another Hotspot Redirect Patent Collection Attempt
Glenn Fleishman writes "Acacia Technologies is turning its sights from collecting streaming media patent fees to Wi-Fi hotspot gateway redirection, we report at Wi-Fi Networking News. The company acquired a patent that they say covers the use of technology that redirects a login attempt by an unauthenticated user to a login gateway page. They want a minimum of $1,000 per quarter in royalties. Nomadix already claims a patent on this, while we quote an early Wayport executive who says that Wayport has prior art on it. Will community hotspots using NoCatAuth fall under this patent-enforcement attempt? Too early to tell."
yea, but the wayback machine has nocat.net back to 4/01. downloads included. whether the 'technology' covered by the patent is there or not is something i didn't check. i wonder if discussion about doing something like that is elsewhere on the site (and if discussion would count as prior art)
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Hmm, Well, In this case one can't really say they are patenting something that's a script which is already used in NoCatAuth.
The patent was filed in 1999, not recently. As best I can tell NoCatAuth started in somewhere in 2001.
It doesn't take much research to find this out.
-Matt
Sorry, you (parent and gp) BOTH missed the point... If you try to use a hotspot without having proper access info, you would be redirected to, say, a login page, describing what to do. That's reasonsable behaviour for a freely-accessible hotspot. Otherwise you'd need signs posted near the spot, etc.
Only now, TWO companies are claiming patents to this trivial fscking idea. One of which bought the idea from some other company!
I know Colubris makes some Wi-Fi access points that redirect unauthenticated traffic to another site for login.
This document seems to suggest that they have been in production at least since 2000, which is earlier than the patent date (2001).
I thought patents were supposed to be non obvious.
If I need a way to authenticate someone on a gateway I redirect them to the login page. This is pretty much the most obvious approach to the problem.
Patented they say.
* spits in disgust *
And I am knowledgeable enough to run a tcpdump -evni wlan0 port 80 followed by a ifconfig wlan0 hw ether 00:0c:f1:22:33:44 with one of the MAC addresses glean in step 1 to avoid that pesky redirection altogether! Yes, this does indeed make the AP free, as in beer (... and, if the patents talks about an effective access-control, it would make the patent non-applicable as well, he...)
Not unwritten. It is called cross-licensing. Basically, they allow each other unlimited, royalty-free access to all their patents.
It backfires on them occasionally when a small startup patents an idea and it gets under the radar but usually all they have to do then is buy out the startup and they are back to square one.
No, it backfires when a litigation company, consisting only of lawyers, acquires a patent they violate. They cannot offer cross-licensing, because the litigation company does not need any patents since it doesn't produce anything. It is only interested in money. And it doesn't want just a tip, usually it goes for something like 10% of the profits.
The rest of your text is accurate.