Novell, Inc.

Novell Intellectual Property Holdings, Inc.

Hilarie Orman

Stephen R Carter

Robert Drew Major

Jamshid Mahdavi

Howard Rollin Davis

An Internet Box Office (IBO) system and technique vends digital content via a computer network, such as the Internet. The IBO system comprises a viewing system that cooperates with a Digital Rights Management system and various deployment enhancements within the Internet to provide an infrastructure that facilitates access to digital content in a manner that comports with copyright law and the control of intellectual property by the copyright owner. The IBO system enables a content copyright owner to retain control of its intellectual property while allowing a consumer to have transparent access to the copyright-protected content via the network. To that end, the IBO system operates to download and stage the copyrighted digital content on the viewing system of a consumer.

Method and mechanism for vending digital content

Networked computing entities which are members of a trusted group share knowledge of a secret value K that is unknown outside the trusted group. When an entity within the trusted group establishes a secure connection, it encodes its name along with the secret value K and an optional random number into a connection identifier. Encoding may use a hash function and/or encryption. By using this connection identifier and the secret value K, other members of the trusted group can decode the connection identifier and gain access to the specific secure connection by using the original cryptographic information for the connection. The connection identifier can be freely transmitted, with little risk that non-trusted entities will be able to use it to gain access to the secure connection.

Security context sharing

A system and a method for transparent takeover (or failover) of a remote client TCP connection from a first server in a cluster of interconnected servers to a second server provides the storing of shared state information relative to the connection on each involved server and using of the shared state information to reestablish the connection on the second server. A message using a sequence number to refer to a previously transmitted data element (such as a byte) is sent by the second server and a received client acknowledgement (ACK) of that sequence number, or a higher one, is used to synchronize the server's data packet transmission sequence number with the ACK-transmitted sequence number. If synchronization is successful, then the connection is restarted on the second server from the point of termination/failure on the first server.

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Woodland Hills, UT, United States of America

Hilarie Orman