Active ticket with dynamic characteristic such as appearance with various validation options

Abstract

A method and apparatus is provided for providing an active ticket in a mobile terminal for use by a mobile terminal user, wherein at least one active ticket has a ticket characteristic that dynamically changes based on one or more states in a life cycle of the active ticket. Dynamic changes to the ticket characteristic include multimedia changes or other presentation data, including text, sound (audio), animation, video, still pictures, or some combination thereof. The active ticket can have different states in it's life cycle, such as purchased, validated, invalid for certain events. Also the ticket service provider or issuer can send new control data to change the characteristic and / or contents of the active ticket.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field Of Invention This invention relates to a ticketing system; and more particularly, to a digital ticketing system for use in conjunction with a mobile phone or terminal. 2. Description of Related Art There are many different known ways to provide a ticket to allow someone to gain access to an event or location. One known way is to distribute a physical ticket having the time and place of the event printed thereon. The ticket is typically handed to a gate attendant when someone enters the premise at which the event is being held. However, the known physical tickets have several problems associated with them, including: 1) They cannot be delivered digitally. In other words, it is impossible to deliver tickets remotely. 2) It is hard to check whether the known ticket is a stolen ticket in most cases, e.g. movie ticket. 3) It is hard to do digital management for the tickets. 4) The physical ticket wastes a lot of paper. More recently, digital tick...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The present invention allows ticket validation without machines. For example, with the copy protection mechanism of the active ticket, validation by the human eye is easy: the control data part can change the appearance of the ticket to, for example, a certain music or picture with a certain background. Ticket verification can be conducted based on image change, sound change and / or frequency change (duration change) of the animation. Without the control data the ticket can sound and look different indicating that the ticket is invalid. The validation can again change the ticket status.

Ticket validation by the human can be based on the presentation of the data that is only available when the control data has been received. This makes copying much more diffcult beforehand but still the validation without machine is easy.

Problems solved by technology

However, the known physical tickets have several problems associated with them, including: 1) They cannot be delivered digitally.

In other words, it is impossible to deliver tickets remotely.

2) It is hard to check whether the known ticket is a stolen ticket in most cases, e.g. movie ticket.

3) It is hard to do digital management for the tickets.

4) The physical ticket wastes a lot of paper.

The digital copy of the ticket can be the same as the original that makes the ticket verification at redemption more difficult.

Many solutions have been proposed for protecting digital tickets, but the extra protection often makes the digital ticket system too complicated, and therefore causes usability issues which impedes the digital ticket uses.

For example, in a mobile environment the digital ticket has some known problems.

Mainly these are related to security issues.

Many ticket validation systems are quite complicated and diminish the usability of such digital ticket systems.

Overall, mobile ticketing is a problem because of the copy protection issue.

This solution has a copy protection problem in that there is no protection: only the first one who is presenting the ticket gets the goods / access.

The problem is that the ticket validation should be a very fast process and this slows the process down.

Traditional cryptographic approaches, such as encryption / decryption, digital signature, etc., are used for protecting digital textual ticket, but it is heavy and costly for mobile devices / services as they should use the same scheme and has usability problem at the ticket redemption point because the following reasons: a) Verification is needed when receiving the ticket.

Both of them cause extra communication and process cost.

Key management is known to be a difficult task.

System establishment is also very expensive.

In addition, the known digital tickets have several other problems, including: 1) It is easy to make an illegal copy of the known digital ticket that is impossible to validate without the help of a machine.

2) Copy protection for digital tickets is typically hard to implement, because, for example, cryptography and key handling for cryptography is complex and potentially risky or costly because it needs hardware secure elements on the terminal, etc.

3) Usability of the known digital tickets is a problem due to the complicated protection based on cryptography.

4) The known digital ticket is hard to conduct redemption / validity check, i.e. it is impossible to check / inspect by a human without machines.

5) The digital ticket makes it hard to support additional business for extra revenue.

6) The life cycle of the known digital ticket is short, and the content of the ticket is hard to renew or update after issuing (the current solution is issuing a new ticket; however, the user typically needs to delete the old ticket.)

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