Another Hotspot Redirect Patent Collection Attempt

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 5, 2004 @01:07PM from the skilled-in-the-art-of-fleecing dept.

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."

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Prior Art? by adamsc · 2004-10-05 14:21 · Score: 0, Redundant

Southwestern's NetReg system was presented at multiple academic conferences in 1999 but the earliest references I found were in June - if they can prove it was in production in January it might be useful: http://southwestern.edu/ITS/netreg/
Re:Nice price(Solution? Class action lawsuit) by jkabbe · 2004-10-06 00:55 · Score: 0, Redundant

Well.. I have the impression that the European Patent Office does a better job than the USPTO at this. Yet European Patents aren't prohibitively expensive, nore is the EPO tax-financed.

I would argue that the vast majority of problem patents in the US are software patents. The EPO doesn't allow those.....yet. So it's not really apples to apples.