Slashdot Mirror
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 ...
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.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
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...
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
This story seems a little weak on facts and links, so this might help. Here are the press releases...
Enjoy...
No Laughing Allowed!
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.
Bouncing comments:"The Truth is, both of these "technologies" look pretty straight forward. I love how pointie haired ones always want to make obvious programming a tradesecret. On the more interesting side: perhaps patents could serve the purpose of seeing who figured out the obvious first?"
No... patents serve the purpose of seeing who is willing to go through the BS to patent an obvious idea that others may have had for decades. They also serve the purpose of showing how clueless the USPO is - by issuing patents on techniques that have been in use for decades.
If not stopped, software and "business idea" patents are going to kill the entreprenurial goose that has laid the golden eggs for the US economy!
Patents were considered so important to innovation that they are provided for in the US Constitution, a pretty short document. But patents issued by an incompetent bureaucracy to those who are copying ideas in use for ages, or to those who patent things that are trivially obvious, violent the intent of the constitution.
There has been a gold rush for patent seekers since the US Supreme court ruled that well known business methods, implemented in software, can be patented. People have been patenting every idea that has been in use for ages, at the expense of the rest of us who are not clued in to this or don't have the time, money or sociopathy to join in this greedfest. The odds are that if you are doing any programming for any sort of business, you are in violation of patents of all sorts.
IT IS RIDICULOUS!
The only good weather is bad weather.
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..
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com