Slashdot Mirror
Transparent Web Caching Patented
JohnQPublic writes "BIND author and all-around Internet personality Paul Vixie and Mirror Image Internet have recently received US patent 6,581,090, specifically '..technology that efficiently stores and retrieves content requests and balances Web traffic between origin servers to improve performance and speed' - sounds an awful lot like what Akamai do. There's a press release from last week that gives some lovely 'details', including this little gem from CEO Alexander M. Vik: 'We anticipate that these patents and our technology solutions will encourage large groups of corporations to become customers of Mirror Image services. We also recognize that this technology is a critical component of other content delivery services and weâ(TM)ll be attempting to work cooperatively with our competitors and their customers to address this issue.' Can you say 'patent infringement suit'?"
Erm, yeah, except for the fact that currently it is OSS that is the main competitor! I don't see companies accepting this...Although it should be the case!
Karem
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
This is starting to get out of hand!
I dont live in US(god bless that nation), but I am afraid that these "IP properties" enforcements is going to far. I use the term "IP properties in general though I shouldn't, but you know what I mean. Will patents and court decision made in US affect me in europe? Will I have to move to some obscure island where no enforcment of US interests exist?
Does the patent office seem more interested with getting new patents out of the hideous "pending" ohase instead of investigating the ramifications of such patents? Patent law is specific, and it is not supposed to be this easy to get a patent on a technology that everyone has been using for so long...
I commented before about not trusting Vixie very much due to some of the things he has done in recent years, and he proves me right.
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Makes MAPS a pay service after orbs (their biggest competitor at the time) closes up shop.
Creates the "members-only" only bind list which deals with bind related security problems.
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01
I don't know if maybe he is pissed off since he isn't thought of as a god or what, but turning internet community related items into pay services isn't a way to become the net got.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but 3 lefts do - Lew of GO magazine
The legal landscape in the US is very favourable to pushing tech industry with less costly labour and probably more importantly IP laws, overseas.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
That difference is absolutely negligible. Even if it's a difference in the fine points of the company strategy, it should NOT be sufficient for a patent. To me this is definitely another case of patent abuse.
if they move all their assets to India or other low-cost countries
Isn't the only added value of Akamai that their servers are always close to you? Moving to India wouldn't do them any good. They'd still need servers in the US.
So I guess this means that I probably don't have to worry about Mirror Image filing suit if I were to (only hypothetically, of course, ;-) ) run a Squid+IPTables transparent proxy at home.
Who's going to patent adding SquidGuard to that mix?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
This is completely pointless. Simply by making the software available, you can claim prior art, which invalidates any patents filed later by third parties on the same technology. Similarly, if the software source has been made public, it can't be patented anyway by anyone.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
'We anticipate that these patents and our technology solutions will encourage large groups of corporations to become customers of Mirror Image services'
It's the technology that should be getting the customers, not the patents, it's this kind of attitude (we're using patents to encourage customers - read FUD) that leads to forgetting why patents are there, to allow you to enjoy the benefit of the attractiveness of your INVENTION, not the attractiveness of your patent
Johns: Well, how does it look now? Riddick: Looks clear.
From what I remember from my economics course patents are not a part of free trade (if I'm wrong someone please correct me). In perfect free trade a competitor would be free to steal your idea and produce it cheaper if he could. Patents are designed to reduce competition, which is bad, but they are also designed to stimulate innovation/invention, which is a reasonable tradeoff. However, the problem is not with patents, the problem is with the US Patent Office granting patents for things it really shouldn't.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Hi,
If you read the texts published by the EP-members that published eg
this
then you will see that they claim to avoid these kinds of "frivolus patents". I guess that one has to really read the proposal to be sure. At least make sure that you say something else than "Don't do it - it will be like horrible like in America" - because the MEP's are told that it won't be like that.
You should remark that the examples of "ok to patent" from the linked text
# an invention in which an X-ray apparatus was controlled by a data processing unit in a way which provided an optimum balance between potentially conflicting operational requirements
# an invention in which an increase in processing speed in a computer was achieved by a new and non-obvious method
actually allows the sorts of patents one sees in the US unless the EUPO is given _ample_ technical expertise to assert which ideas really are new.
Even better is of course to explain why patents on software are evil in all shapes and forms (if that is true).
Or to explain that the bennefits of "good patents" will be outweighed by the disasterous roadblocks to normal conpetetion on the software market that the inevitable "bad/frivolous patents" will create.
In short - MAKE SURE THAT YOUR ARGUMENT IS NOT EASILY DISMISSED BY YOUR MEP AS "OUR PROPOSAL TAKES CARE OF THAT"! If it is dismissed easily your mail will do more harm than good.
By documenting prior art, you can invalidate any patents filed later by third parties on the same technology.
By filing a defensive patent, you can negotiate against any patents filed later by third parties on different but still obvious (*cough* - 1-click anything - *cough*) technology.
Since the patent office seems to currently approve patents on "doing something people have done for centuries... but with a computer!" this may be necessary.
Of course, I'd want to see in writing something which grants open source software a perpetual license to use such patents, as opposed to say Red Hat's "we promise not to enforce our patents against free software unless someone buys us out or we change our minds" promise.
The press release also mentions patent no.s 5,991,809, 6,370,580 and 6,480,893.
It turns out the last two deal with offloading requests for static content to a separate webserver. Well, isn't that a common use for mod_rewrite? It certainly existed back then, this is the earliest page I can find where it became an 'official' part of apache (I am sure theres more in the cvs logs) - thats from Jan 97, version *3* of mod_rewrite. The patents weren't filed until 5 months later.
Before it was an official apache module, mod_rewrite was released in 1996 and there is evidence of people using it for offloading requests from one server to another that same year.
-Baz
I'm not sure what the poster meant by "sounds like what Akamai do", but Akamai is far from a "transparent cache proxy". Anyone who has used Akamai for more than 2 minutes would realize this. The only things Akamai might do that could be somehow linked to the patent is that Akamai is a cache that distributes data regionally. It's not transparent and it's not terribly easy to use for the we developer, either.
Kris
Kriston
The point, however, is not how Mirror Image actually operates, but what their patent covers. If you read the patent, it really describes any transparant proxy. The system just needs to intercept the request, see if the request is for a particular web page, then redirect it if it is or pass it on if not. From just browsing the published patent it appears that the priority date of the patent is in 1997, so this patent has been tossing around in the PTO for a while. It might be a pain to find some decent prior art for this, but I suspect that people were doing this sort of thing for quite a while.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
This is all addressed in Zechariah 11 of the Bible (apt-get --install bible; bible; Zec 11;;;;). It isn't a US-only thing. It isn't a today-only thing. It's shepherds eating their sheep, and selling their sheep to each other to eat. But the problem, as outlined in Zec 11, is that the sheep get the shepherd they deserve.
Sorry, them's the breaks.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
First he takes over maintenance of BIND, then proceeds to blackmail his "customers" into paying him to be told about the copious amount of security problems, essentially capitalizing on the work of others.
Then he had BIND 9 written, which has nothing to do with BIND. We call it BIND then? Again, to capitalize on the work of others (not that the BIND name is something to carry proudly).
Now he patents what Linux could do at least since 2.0 (1996) with a patched squid 1 (been there, done that). Granted, his patent appears to be earlier than Akamai (1998) but Digital Island may have been early enough to invalidate the patent. They were bought by Cable and Wireless a while ago.
Their patent claims read like a first-pass analysis of the caching-load balancing problem.
To my mind, this sort of thing should not be patentable - it is merely a problem analysis, not an innovative solution.
Most competent people who understood networks and the issues behind content provision would have come up with a similar, if not identical solution.
This could have been failed on the 'non-obvious' requirement, but hasn't been.
It seems that the technical abilities of the patenting authorities are not of a level to deal with patent applications such as this one competently (or indeed in a timely fashion, if it was filed in 1996).
The best solution for everyone (except greedy patent factories such as this example) is to outlaw the patenting of software and software designs. There's plenty of copyright law out there to protect the code you write, and if it's not the best code at the most appropriate price, then you'll fail in the market and too bad.
If on the other hand you have a true innovation in your field, you'll have a good 12 months to build the initial market before the competition comes to play.
If America really is true to the principles of the Founders, it's time that the politicians looked at this issue and came up with a solution to stamp on parasitical patents such as this. Even if unsuccessful in their aims of extracting money, the costs to others in the field of dealing with the attentions of these people is a disruption to trade, and needs to be eliminated.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
"The US pattent office is well on it's way to push every profitable tech offshore... hey, maybe I should pattent that !"
You are dead on there... The United States is PATENTING itself out of it's tech lead.
Patents when they work as originally intended are supposed to ENCOURAGE, not stifle innovation. Our current "rubber stamp" patent process encourages innovation only in the Microsoft meaning of the word: command and coercion.
Software and business method patents should NOT be granted. Patents should only be granted for MATERIAL things, actual PRODUCTS.
But, this is the 21st Century world. Intellectual Property is the new oil, the new gold, and the rules are set up so that only the largest multi corporate cartels can own, develop, or exploit any of it.
Anyone outside of that strata who comes up with a new idea will either find it stolen from them (because they can't afford to patent it or even FIGHT patent infringement by a corp), or will find themselves sued out of existance by any IP cartel that finds itself threatened.
Look at Napster... One of the last truly "killer apps" invented. Instead of BUYING it and running it as a paid service, while they could have done so, the RIAA chose to sue the world.
The p2p battle is just the beginning of what is going to happen all over the place in the coming years: UNDERGROUND IP.
Corporatism != Free Market
However, the second two claims mention replacing/mirroring only part of the content of a server, which would require a kernel module to parse HTTP request packets. This is not so trivial to implement - but still an obvious elaboration. Of course, a tool to automatically maintain DNAT tables based on a high level network description would be non-trivial to implement also - but an obvious labor saver for large networks.
If only there was a patent on DNAT, they couldn't get away with this. In fact, claim 1 seems to be exactly DNAT if generalized to arbitrary ports. This illustrates the fundamental problem with software patents. Most software engineering is putting together building blocks in simple combinations to fit a particular application. Imagine getting a patent on particular combinations of programs in a pipeline. I'm patenting "ps -ef | grep".
If their patent covered only parsing HTTP packets in a router, I would be only annoyed. If I needed the capability bad enough to devote the time to do it, I could probably use their product cheaper. However, if claim 1 is going to prevent me from ever using DNAT again, I am outraged - but impotent as usual. Like it or not, I probably violate thousands of stupid patents every day without knowing it. What's one more.
I'm not sure when they actually registered for the patent, but we were doing transparent web caching in 1998 with squid and linux. Prior art case, here we come.
Course, I have a feeling these people patent things just to see who will fall for it, or to get other people up in a tizzy.
IANAL, but -- if it infringes on the US patent, and you use it in the US, you're infringing. Patents give the holder complete control over the use of the invention for the period of the patent. Having an implementation done outside the US, which may be perfectly legal, doesn't gain you anything in terms of being able to use it legally inside the US.
No. He's saying that he knows technology better. And that the technical difference between the two approaches is tiny.
I somehow doubt that the USPTO examiner has as much as looked at, e.g., squid.
And could this claim made now be used successfully as a defense in the future? Do you want to bet *your own* company/job+bank account on that?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This was predicted a while ago when patents were used as threats toward the Open Source community. If every idea in the world was to be patented tomorrow, what do you think would be the result? No, not anarchy, but definetly a breakdown in "the system" as we know it. More than likely after a few weeks or months of chaotic legal issues congress or some other form of government would step in and pass legislation changing how patents work. In the end though the Open Source community would be hit the hardest as they tend to be the most controversial source of innovation in technology.
Lots of open source works are illegal in many countries because they perform the same function as other works which are closed-source and either patented or copyrighted or both. This is a result of laws which restrict freedom of thought and speech in order to maintain the status quo and capitalism's roots: dominance over competition. The problem is, Open Source works were not meant to compete with other products or companies. When you put the GNU General Public Lisence on your software, the last thing on your mind should be whether or not you will be able to keep others from reproducing the work or taking and developing it into something different or better. Open Source is a springboard from which new innovation and technology can come from. Yet it is being abused and in some respects destroyed by the principles some governments operate upon.
When you patent something so simple and useful as web caching, you're cutting off the Open Source community and its users and developers from the freedom to express themselves. Who came up with one idea or another should have nothing to do with whether or not someone is allowd to take and use that idea. Essentially, patents are to the Open Source community as a muzzle is to freedom of speech.
HowStuffWorks' "How Patents Work" describes a benefit of patents for society: They help disseminate technological information to other inventors. When you apply for a patent, you are required to submit a detailed description of your invention. This description becomes part of the patent office's database, which is public record. Once the patent has expired, the idea is more readily available than it would have been if it had never been patented. The problem with this "dissemination of technological information" is that it takes 20 years in the USA for it to occur. That's 20 years longer than it should take. Inventors can't just take an idea and use it for another idea like with Open Source; instead an inventor would have to purchase a license to use the original idea in his newly spawned idea. This puts Open Source "inventors" at a significant disadvantage because a great amount of Open Source work is made free in the monetary sense of the word (i.e. gratis). Because of that, many Open Source developers don't have the funds to purchase a license and therefore can't use the original idea. Now, profit isn't completely foreign to Open Source works. The GNU General Public License specifically encourages people to profit from an Open Source work by charging money for its distribution. Of course under the terms of the GPL someone could simply purchase the product (and therefore a copy of the source) and then give it out freely to everyone else in the world. This is what some people in business and government do not understand and do not take advantage of. Immediately these people say "but then you can't make a profit because someone is already giving it away!" And so the government is supposed to make sure that NOBODY can simply 'give it away'? What then is to become of the Open Source works that are made by developers who don't have $3,000 to spend on a patent they don't want to restrict anyone from using or enforce anyone to obey? They're supposed to get fucked, that's what is to become of them. In the name of the executive, the legislative, and the judicial powers, Amen.
The idea of a patent is a great thing. Invent