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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."
The rerouted IP address provides content to the user machine in which at least a majority of the content is different from that expected to be obtained by the user machine
How about showing the requested page as is (for example google.com goes to google's homepage) but with a DHTML overlay or framing to indicate this is the only page to go until the user's properly authenticated?
Seriously, There patening a script that is used already by other projects. What's next? companies are going to patent an access is denied pages for failed logins?
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In the end we are ALL disconnected....
Maybe this isn't so bad after all. One of the few pluses to patents is the way they sometimes keep people from using really bad ideas that they should be prevented from using. This is a good example.
I mean, come on, this patent is on something so ridiculously simple and obvious, how could it even have been approved in the first place?
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I'm not a vegan because I love animals, I'm a vegan because I hate plants!
Hell, we have a perl script http://sourceforge.net/projects/netreg/ that does that on our network - will they be comming after us next?
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
Unfourtunatly, there is something called a "Business Method Patent", where you can patent ways of doing business. IBM used to hold a very silly one of these. Their patent was: Assigning numbers to those waiting in line for washrooms so that they do not need to stay in line until it is their turn. That obviously is not the exact text, but you should get the idea of what the patent did. It was completely rediclous (and IBM realized this and "released" the idea publicly).
I remember back in 2000 I was in Malaysia and a hotel there had the wired version... i.e. plug in computer, try to surf anywhere or pop email from anywhere and you get redirected to a page to agree to pay 20RM for a day's access, charged to your room.
The system was done by an Australian Company iirc.
(And hence probably dated from prior to 2000)
You could use usb or ethernet for that one. Adding wireless as another option is clearly trivial! Perhaps that company is the one with the original patent?
There is prior art in the forced proxy authentication in the Whistle InterJet, circa 1997/1998, prior to the purchase of the company by IBM.
-- Terry (former Whistle Communications and IBM employee)
The patent covers a system that changes the destination field the packet. What if your system doesn't do that. I use NoCat on FreeBSD and the rule the does the "redirection" does it with IPFW fwd, man ipfw(8), which does not modify the packet in any way, specifically modifying the destination field. It seems to me that such a system is not covered by the claims of this patent. By the way, I got one of this "Licensing Materials" packets today. So nice of them to provide such a nicely arranged extortion note.
Holy crap. Its true!
#6,329,919 : System and method for providing reservations for restroom use
Slightly more complex then one would first think. The system can grant reservations based on some critera, for example (I am not making this up) if the requestee is a first class passanger or not.
" Easy to disprove. Just give the dated source, with CVS log. NoCatAuth existed far before the claimed date."
The problem is that you still need to engage lawyers and the courts and the patent holder will do their damnedest to hold out and rack up the costs as long as possible (See SCO vs World for more info)
The end result is that the small company may decide that it is cheaper to simply cough up than to get embroiled in a drawn out legal stoush.
Repost from another post follows;
Perhaps a solution to this problem is to award damages against the claimant to an amount that is double what was being claimed (plus costs) if a bodgy patent doesn't hold water in court.
It would make the companies who decide to sue all and sundry for patent violations think long and hard about the validity of their patent and it would give the company being sued an incentive to actually fight it in court instead of just rolling over because it is the cheapest option.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
If all you want to do is control access to your wifi hostpot generally, then all you have to do is control access based on the SOURCE address, not the DESTINATION address.... In other words, ALL communication from an unknown MAC address is redirected to an authentication server, period. Once a machine is authenticated, then you can allow access generally.
This would, I think get around this patent. It's also the way that I would tend to approach this whole problem anyways. I haven't seen the other patent (yet), so I have no idea if this idea infringes on that one.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The patent system the big companies built up pivots vitally uppon the presupposition that they will be fighting other big companies. The game requires that the big players hold out the little players completely while going into their own Deadlock ("Deadly Embrace" etc) to steal a computer term, with their acknowledged rivals. The Big X companies depend on being able to cross licence amidst themselves.
This falls apart completely in the face of an "IP Holding Company."
When you face a company that has patents on what you want to do, but has absolutely no need for the patents that you have to offer them back, then you are hoist by your own pitard.
In the many decades before the ninties, getting a patent meant something. You had to build something tangable and so you had to have paid up but good to get your patent. You had to be somebody before you could be a patented somebody.
But with software patents all you have to be is a bullshit artist with $400 bucks and a lawyer.
So there is springing up today a cotage industry of holding companies with "intellectual property" who will undermine the great companies in exactly the way that long-range high-powered cannon made the castle pointlessly expensive.
Actually a better analogy would be sappers. Little companies that burrow under the edges of a largs companies' development and product infrastructure and "go off". They either get crushed or they breach the wall and take a good bit of loot away with them.
And just like the lords of yore, the big companies will fight back for a while by trying to build bigger walls by strengthening the patent process. But it needs must fail, because the new rules of engagement say that walls don't work.
*Eventually* some company, some really big company (are you listeneing IBM? Sun? Microsoft?), is going to get smart and figure out that software patents have turned the basalt under their walls to sandstone. They will put together their lobying groups and try to remove the software patents.
They'll be dumb about it, of course, and try to preserve the patents they already have (those things were expensive after all) and they will make the second-tier mess.
Finally the whole thing will eventually go the way of the Perpetual Motion Machine, and all the patents will be vacated en-masse.
The most critical factor in the timing is whether our "organs of state" will be able to successfully "infect" Europe with the STD that is "business process (software) patents."
If errope falls it will add twenty years to the timeline and both the US and the EU will become the software and information systems third-world behind Asia and "the southern continents".
If the EU is smart enough as a political organisim, only the US will have to sink to third-world status on the internet to find the motivation to undo its mess. That should only take about fifteen to twenty years if things remain as they are today.
Between here and there we should expect the North American DRM Cabal will make our lives quite ugly here.
I for one don't welcome our new ??AA overlords, but I know them to be an enevitable "quaint feature" of the twenty-tens...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press