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Akamai & Digital Island Patent Clash
rf600r writes: "In a NutShell: Akamai does content delivery. Digital Island does content delivery. (DI, however, actually has a network, too. Not just boxes.) In order to effectively deliver content to the end-user from the best server, Akamai uses a 'secret sauce' they say they invented. Digital Island uses a 'secret sauce,' too. Now, Akamai has sued Digital Island saying they stole Akamai's 'secret sauce.' DI responds with a counter-suit saying Akamai actually stole the idea from them. Is it even the same technology? Who knows ...
This is just incredibly lame. It's reminiscent of 3dfx suing NVidia over multitexturing, and then NVidia filing 5 lawsuits against 3dfx for standard video controller technology. By the definitions of the patents, even ATI, Matrox, or Trident could've infringed on them. It's absolutely deplorable that lawsuits are becoming acceptable within the bounds of business ethics.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Oh yeah, incendentally, F5 networks has a product called 3dns which works like this:
1. client looks up www.whatever.com
2. client's nameserver queries the 3dns system that's authoritative for whatever.com
3. 3dns hands back a random IP for one of the different data centers, but inserts a very low TTL
4. 3dns tells the 3dns systems (or the BigIP systems) in the remote data centers to gather path metrics of the client's nameserver (using UDP probes, pings, etc...)
5. Remote centers send metric info back to the main 3dns unit
6. Subsequent requests for www.whatever.com result in being handed the ip for the logically (not necessarily geographically) closest data center.
I'm fairly sure this is how Akamai's system works. I couldn't find any patents on the procedure. F5 does have a patent on load balancing technology, but it looks like it only covers their BigIP product.
F5's 3dns has been around longer than Akamai also, so if they're claiming this as part of the lawsuit, there is prior art.
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read that as "Patent Cash"?
:-)
Everyone has to pay us royalties to use cash now. And royalties on the royalties. Bwahahahaha.
The really scary part is, I only thought it wasn't a story cause I knew what Akamai was. Throw a couple of bank names in instead and I'd have probably not noticed what it really said for a lot longer.
Sauth patents patenting things. Take that, bitch.
I figure about the time that business is done with this self-mutilation that economy will slide right into the hole. If the trends of the turn of the 20th Century are anything to go on, we're seeing it all over again--patents of all sorts will fall out of favor. Methinks that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
I think I'll patent the idea of putting a power button on home computers - I bet Apple would license it for the glory and ad-value.
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Probably because he has half a brain. Akamaized content servers rely on the fact that Akamai can figure out where on the network a request is comming from. It is NOT practical to put a HTTP redirect at the edge of every single network, in the hopes that it will get the server closest to the edge. It IS practical to let DNS do this for you. Not to say that it is overly simple, but it wouldn't be all that difficult to 'hack' DNS to include a simple network metric (like the AS number?) as part of the A records. This would allow ANYONE to have BIND spit back a specific IP address as the resolved IP for a specific name based on the source of the request!
Of course, I am not 100% certain this is exactly how Akamai does this, but it DOES describe how I would solve the problem (and in fact summerizes a short paper I sent to the IETF about 3 years ago...)
3 years ago is also about the same time that the guys that started Akamai finished thier research into the best way to get this stuff to work seamlessly...
So did I.
This is simply yet another example of how patent law is used to harrass competitors. Reminds me of how $cientology abuses and attempts to redefine copyright law to attack their critics.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Akamai is inserting urls with some funny server names like http://a388.g.akamai.net/f/388/21/15m/www.cnn.com/ images/hub2000/ad.info.gif (for the cnn f.e.) that funny names are then looked up by your browser and the reply of the DNS server should point you to the list of the "nearest" Akamai servers.
The problem with AS records is that you actually can't create a good working mechanism only knowing the routing metric. You have to know something about the bandwidth awailable (that you can't), or use some indirect methods like measuring latency and throughoutput.
Just because you Open Source your project doesn't mean you are immune from patent infringment claims. In fact, it is widely believed that you may actually be opening yourself up more fully to patent claims (witness NVidia vs 3dfx) because its easier to prove that you are in violation of the bad patent when the source code is easily available to the company that might sue you.
I think he doesn't realize how stupid he is. Just smile and nod; that's what I do.
From what little information there was in the article, it seems that both of the patents are still pending and thus you aren't going to find references to them in online databases.
The most funny thing about both of the technologies is that both of them are perfoming not as good as possible. For example you can have a look at http://www.terena.nl/conf/wcw/Proceedings/S4/S4-1. pdf - very nice paper that created a few hours long flame war between the authors and the Akamai people during the conference.
What is more interesting for the Open Source people is that Internet 2 team is working on Digital Storage Initiative (should be at http://dsi.internet2.edu/) that is creating the Content Delivery Network for the educational and research organizations. I'm sure that they have already that "secret sauce" so if you have any code (not words) you can try to convince them to work with theirs code.
The other funny thing about the Content Delivery Networks is that you can make them by yourself by integrating your own mirror in the Web Cache meshes (but this can be used mostly in Europe with a huge number of caches already installed).
sorry, cheap attempt at being a karma whore. i need more practice.
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You are still a jackass. But no matter. I can cure that because I know where you live.
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One of the things that always puzzled me about this approach is the need to re-calculate the metrics almost with every hit. There was a period of time early last year when the security mailing lists were full of people complaining about F5's product effectively acting like a scanner.
My view on this is that once you've calculated a metric there is really no need to go an recalculate it so often, after all the changes in topology are not that frequent, in particular for non-US sites (fundamentally you are at the end of a pipe, often congested, to the USofA). I wonder how much congestion their high-priority ICMP traffic provoked...
It's all just Thousand Island salad dressing. Don't be fooled!
We use a 3dns for load balancing. There are several probing levels you can use to figure the metrics. We have it set on the least "invasive" mode, but we'll still get emails and phone calls from people saying someone is scanning their network. It does a couple of UDP probes to gather it's metrics, and some IDS systems pick it up and label it as hostile. I don't think it uses ICMP at all since routers under heavy load will give ICMP the lowest priority.
I don't understand either why it will sometimes recalculate metrics to a particular host so often. Once it has it's metrics, it should keep them for some amount of time. I assume that if someone from a particular network is going through the site being load balanced, it will continue to calculate metrics to give the user the best possible service while they're browsing around.
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It's interesting you said that they are just using the prior art in a different way than everyone else. This constituates a new use for an old device, which is grounds for a patent. As long as it wasn't obvious to anyone at the time that someone applied for the patent then it's patentable.
Just so long as it isn't "special sauce"
Here's the patent they are fighting about.
:) Who knows, with the stupid patent people we have, they may just be able to slip it through.
It really looks to me like a glorified squid setup. Squid does exactly the same thing (distributed servers that can talk to each other and serve up content that another server already has). Squid doesn't accept URL's the way akamai's system does though. As far as having the client directed to the closest Akamai server, I think that's all done in DNS, and Akamai does not own any patents like that. This patent comes close to the DNS part of it, but it also references a few others that may be better.
As far as I'm concerned, I don't think either of these companies really "invented" anything. Everything they are using is prior art. They just happen to use it in a different way than anyone else. Now if only they could patent their business model...
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Wired says Akamai and Sandpiper were the first to "use the trick of rewriting URLs as a hook into the alternative system." That is, Akamai's technology doesn't just perform routing-optimization, it breaks the connection between domain and location and rewrites the address entirely, using any of a large number of servers for the new route. A short time later or connecting from a different machine the redirection taking place is likely to be entirely different.
Wired's article (dated August 99) states clearly Akamai and Sandpiper were the first companies to use algorithms for actual rewriting of addresses. The cofounder of Akamai, Danny Lewin wrote the algorithms as part of his thesis and mathematics and patented it.
Akamai said Digital Island is infringing on a patent awarded last month to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT licenses that technology exclusively to Akamai <...>. Digital Island said it believes it isn't infringing on the patent. The company has "patent pending claims for the same inventions claimed by MIT" that predate MIT's patent claim.
DI need to have it implemented/published/writen/whatever one year before Akamai's patent was filed, then thay can nulify Akamai's patent. Any info on exact dates what was implemented when?
It is stipulated that the invention should not
be obvious. Here we have two companies
independently coming up with same tech (or so
they claim), apparently at roughly the same time.
This to me defines an obvious "invention".
The court should invalidate both patent claims.
'Course pigs will hover over frozen hell before
our system serves the public interest.
Just like the KFC's "Colonel Sander's 17 Secret Spices", and Coca Cola's Top Secret Locked-In-The-Vault Formula, this case for "Secret Sauce" smells like another episode for the Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy series.
Unfortunately, unlike the Mad Magazine's Spy Vs. Spy serial, there is no White Hat here.
Both sides are suing each others because of patents, and both sides are determined to milk that patent (aka Secret Sauces) to the fullest, and we, the consumers, will end up footing the bills (legal and all other things).
Sad, isn't it?
Sad to see that our tech-sphere has been invaded by the invertibrate-lawyers.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Umn.
Dunno why I'm even bothering, but if you do some simple subtraction, you'd see by user numbers that 'emerson' has been around since basically day one, and Willowick is a newbie.
Different folks. Don't confuse the two.
Thanks.
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Please. When your country goes down the crapper because of all this I hope you don't drag the rest of the world down with you. I see our beloved monopoly British Telecom is in the process of patenting hyperlinks, so the lunacy is spreading. I would also like to ask the clown who patented the windowing for Y2K method to have a word with me, since I first used that method in 1990 and he appears to be in violation of my intellectual (ha!) property. I think my sig says it all.
I'm not sure that Akamai just uses it's own cache servers - I run squid just as a transparent proxy for my own network, but I found that when one of the internal clients requested one of the Akamai indirected URL's, then I suddenly got a lot of packets (all blocked at the firewall) from an IP that reverse-resolved to machine 'ghost.akamai.com'.
All these packets were addressed to port 1080 - this seems like Akamai may be trying to force my cache to pre-load selected content so they can look good...... but since I'm at the end of a S....l......o.....o......o......w link, that basically saturated my bandwidth, and acted as DoS.
(Yes, SYN packets to 1080 are blocked at the firewall - but these were large data packets - maybe some attempted connection spoofing was involved?)
Liquor
Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
Call it a "Poor man's location finder," the way I did it. But DNS, however, is an intresting idea. Maybe Akamai pharzes DNS records to select the best server to go with. They're doing alot with DNS these days...
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Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
The public has access to issued patent applications and the file associated with the interference (the pleadings, judgement and such) if the interference involves at least one issued patent once the interference is over . Note that interferences are neither short nor fast. Access to pending patent applications involved in the interference is still restricted.
Transalation: Unless Digital Island releases their patent application publically somehow (or the application issues as a patent), there will be no public access to it. At some point the interference proceedings may make it out to the public however since Akami's patent has issued.
Disclaimer: This is not legal advice. Seek competent legal advice. I don't represent you. The opinions herein are my own and not those of my employer or anyone else.
I didn't see 'Windows beats Linux' anywhere in the story, or any mention of Napster.
But both companies have released press releases full of the usual lawyer-speak about how only one company is allowed to have an idea about a subject and basically we'll see you in court.
Talk about making yourself the laughing stock of the tech industry.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
No, it looks more like Digital Forecast has no clue what it is talking about. Akamai may have been in business first, but Digital Island filed it patents TWO years before Akamai. Just in case you have been living under a rock for the last 100+ years, YOU CAN'T PATENT A CONCEPT! I guess they wern't first after all! BTW: Akamai has a bad habit of threatening/taking legal action against anyone who looks like a competitor. Not only did Akamai com in second, their technology is ONLY about the web. DI's tech is a low latency network for all types of applications.
is that like Arby's secret sauce??? mmm....
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Programming, is like sex.
I'll apply for the Making Font Colors Consistant Through Internet Documents Using References to Style Metadata patent next week. ;)
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
This story seems a little weak on facts and links, so this might help. Here are the press releases...
Enjoy...
No Laughing Allowed!
Did they steal code? I doubt it... did they have the same idea? Of course! My experience from what little web-scripting I've done has shown that there are only so many ways to keep track of unique user-session content, so I imagine the way they implement the idea is also extremely similar (eg, long long URLs)...
I imagine this was a top-level idea. Today in the US I heard that 60% of kids know what a 'modem' is, and only 23% of executives do.
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Since when logic(or common sense for that matter) ever interfered with corporate policy(such as filing law suits)? This is BUSINESS we're talking about here, folks, don't try to figure it out. Heck, in the end they always end up spilling it all on the floor...
CNET Article
For those who dont want to cut & paste
to the CNET story (which is actually from Bloomberg News but fairly content free AND from the 18th)
--meredith
--meredith
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis
It seems to me that it would be hard to win a patent case, if the most specific you are going to get about your product is "secret sauce". Is there a better explaination somewhere, or is that actually how specific they got?
-The Tempest
A link to the patent in question.
if both sides had fully open sourced products, there wouldn't be a problem now would there?
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Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
"Are you sure you included a URL? Didja test them for typos?"
Who knows, indeed. This is typical of Slashdot's cathedral method of story selection, as compared to kuro5hin's bazaar method. Many eyes make all bugs shallow, and all that. I'm surprised ESR hasn't picked up on this yet.
And for the record, I have not seen any data or information from either side of this lawsuit. But shouldn't be too hard to implement anyway. Proxy server anyone?
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Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
It's a good thing the poster used the term "secret sauce."
Anything more technical than that obviously would have gone over the heads of slashdot readers, huh?
everybody knows it's thousand island dressing! Oh wait, we're not talking
about McDonald's. My bad.
Here is the info on the patent in question, served up by IBM's patent server: US 06108703
Digital Island press release
I would post the link to Digital Island's patent, but neither their press release nor the news stories I've seen contain the patent number. A search for "Digital Island" or "Sandpiper" on patents.uspto.gov turns up nothing. Any ideas?
Note that these claims are not for the same thing. Akamai's patent, titled "Global Hosting Service", covers something which is basically their FreeFlow service, down to very specific details. It talks about modifying a site's pages to point at Akamai, using DNS to direct users at the optimal host for them, specific methods of redundancy for web and DNS servers, specific algorithms for overflowing between regions in case of overload (use of a "min-cost multicommodity flow algorithm"), and so forth. While I'm not keen on software patents in general, this seems like one of the less sinister ones; it is nonobvious and highly specific, not a patent-the-world sort of thing.
Digital Island has been doing content delivery for a while, and as they've been outperformed by Akamai, the workings of their service have been getting closer and closer to what Akamai is doing; Akamai argues that they've gotten to the point of basically copying. I have no idea whether their claim has merit; maybe someone who is more familiar with these services could comment.
DI's infringement suit is based on a patent on "fingerprinting" content to check for freshness. I don't know what their patent claim is; my only guesses seem like pretty obvious things, like checking MD5 hashes for web content against those in a cache. But it's clearly a very small part of a content delivery system, and not at all the same thing that Akamai's patent covers.
DI also claims to have preexisting patent-pending claims for the same thing Akamai has patented, but since it's not an actual patent, I'm not sure how to examine this for myself.
invertibrate-lawyers. Score -1: Redundant.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
In the US, patents grant a 20-year monopoly to the person who can prove they thought of something first*. Say you and I don't know each other, I invent something, and you invent it the next day. I then get a patent. By law, I can sue you for patent infringement if you're still using your invention. I can sue you, even though you were just as inventive than me. All that matters is that I was a day earlier.
There's usually no pejorative undercurrent to patent infringement cases, actually. Patent infringement cases are usually just coldblooded strategic marketing in action.
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* Yeah, yeah, this is simplified -- in the US, there are also tons of rules about whether you kept it s3kr1t enough, whether someone else can prove they did it first, etc etc.
In conclusion, maybe all the Slashdot editors have been so drunk, they have hired minions of horny monkeys to approve story submissions. Can it get any worse? Hopefully, only better..
Discussion sites based on the Scoop engine let the users pick the stories. Kuro5hin is the most popular Scoop site.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Someone (maybe the FSF) needs to get a anti-patent granted for lawsuits! A sufficient obfuscated, buzzword-compliant application could probably get by patent examiners; look what they've already granted patents for ;-) Then when someone tries to sue, step in and tell them they can't, you have a patent on the lawsuit!
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Using different A records in DNS depending of the location of who is requesting the IP of the name, so that you can send him to a server closer to him.
No big deal. No point of patenting such an evidence.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Sorry, but these systems are a bit more complicated than your little open source HTTP proxies.
This would not be a problem if people weren't re-inventing the wheel all the time because one idiot was trying to hide "what the man did behind the curtain" from everybody else.
I hope they both are forced to put the code out for us to laugh at.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Not only did Hemos forget to include a link or two, he forgot to close the italics too :)
While I'm at it, does anyone know what exactly te patent(s) in question are for? To be honest, I'm too lazy to go look them up. Aren't they the companies that help Yahoo, etc. work more quickly?
For a second, I thought we were going to have the biggest flame-fest in Slashdot history: I read that as "Akamai & Digital Island Patent CASH."
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Put the mayonaise out in the sun!
This
Under the U.S. patent offices law, you are given a specific time to challenge a patent. Since DI's application predates Akamai's, they might be given a chance.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Obviously, any patent suit is just going to hurt both parties, but it seems like Akamai is the "good guys" in this case. According to Digital Forecast, Akamai was in business a long time before Digital Island, so it seems they have a pretty legitimate claim to the concept here. After all, they were first...
when one company that will never be profitable sues another company that will never be profitable for the rights to a technology that is incapable of growing a profitable company around it. I guess we'll just have to find out...
Recently, Slashdot.com has been posting stories with malformed links, links pointing to the incorrect address, and stories misgarbled to the point where the reader cannot click through to a web page or understand the entire article. Meanwhile, many readers have been submitting news articles about free domain names, new anti spam legislation, and even the popular "Microsoft Plan to Take Over the World. "
Thankfully, several readers were able to quickly post links to today's story.
In conclusion, maybe all the Slashdot editors have been so drunk, they have hired minions of horny monkeys to approve story submissions. Can it get any worse? Hopefully, only better..
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