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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'?"
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?
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
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.
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
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