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'?"

Comments

squid

[Unominous Coward]

This better not affect squid.

If it does, I can see a number of ISPs going belly up due to the increased cost of traffic.

Re:squid

[indros]

Only if iptables is set up to forward any port 80 requests to 3128 automatically, it would!

Re:squid

[tijsvd]

If this would affect squid, it would be a very strong case of prior art.

Re:squid

[Xformer]

Unless you're using squid to balance the load between servers all over the Internet, it doesn't look like it will. It seems like all of the claims are based around a system that redirects requests from a client to a server to a mirror of that server that may be closer and, consequentially, quicker to access.

Basically, if you're in Finland and try to hit google.com, something like this might automatically redirect you to google.fi instead, so you're not going over a slower trans-Atlantic link.

Re:squid

[Zeinfeld]

I strongly suspect that this was actually a defensive patent filing. Of course such filings frequently fall into the wrong hands. I suspect that the real issue here would be interference between the mirror image patent and the Akamai patents. Both are in my view unenforceable, both because of prior art and in the case of the Akamai patents failure to disclose relevant information.

Yet again we see the old patent lawyer trick of stating large amounts of prior art in the description then making claims that dircetly cover the prior art. Essentially the inventive step here is claiming ownership of all possible embodiments of an idea that have not already been invented - the fact that the contributions of the inventor are miniscule not being considered relevant in the corrupt USPTO system.

If this would affect squid, it would be a very strong case of prior art.

There are much earlier examples of prior art. Tim Berners-Lee described the basic concept of Web caches in his CHEP/Annecy address in 1992. CERN distributed a caching Web proxy in 1993, the HTTP specifications were extensively adapted in 1995 to support cache use with input from Jeff Moghul and Jim Gettys. People can also find W3C notes that were published arround that time that describe extended cache architectures by Phill Hallam-Baker. This was the original purpose of the W3C log format.

The Akamai scheme is also compromised by prior art. The W3C deployed a system for serving web pages from multiple servers in 1995. Requests from Europe went to the French server, first at CERN, then Inria. This is a particularly important piece of prior art since I told the alleged inventor about it and it was in any case operating out of the same floor as one of the alleged inventors. Rohit Khare and myself had extensive discussions concerning the alleged invention but we are not listed as inventors, another probloem for the Akamai patent.

Looking at the later claims some would appear to be pe-empted by the Open-Market patent application several years earlier, this was an EU patent filing that was hastily withdrawn after a ton of prior art was dumped on the applicants.

The idea of transparent web caching is not new either. TIS created a transparent Web proxy sometime before 1998, the concept of web proxies and web caches have always been closely related. The combination is both obvious and covered by prior art.

Also there are extensive discussions on the HTTP WG mailoing list and the www-talk list before that on the topic of transparent caches. These are generally considered a bad thing.

What should happen here is prosecution of the USPTO under RICO. Their activities resemble a protection racket more closely with every corrupt patent they issue.

akamai overseas ?

[selderrr]

if they move all their assets to India or other low-cost countries, they hit a double whammy : cheaper labour + no pattent fees.

The US pattent office is well on it's way to push every profitable tech offshore... hey, maybe I should pattent that !

Re:akamai overseas ?

[selderrr]

Crossing the atlantic (for example) adds a bandwidth bottleneck and increases ping times by at least 50ms (roundtrip). The whole point of caching is to avoid the former and the latter isn't peanuts either.

Do they have to cross the atlantic ? How about setting things up in Mexico, right across the border ? A few miles of fibre and you're in the USA...

Don't flame me if this isn't feasible... I'm just wondering.

GPL'd patents

[Anonymous Coward]

What we need is people to allow their patented software to be used royalty-free in GPL'd software. This way, they would still get royalties from commercial vendors (which they should) without hurting open source. It seems like this would be a perfect candidate.

The EFF should patent stuff

[brunes69]

If we want to fight this patent battle the solution is not to sit back, wait until a patent comees out, then bitch about it. We need to be pro-active.

The EFF and/or the FSF should be actively going out and patenting every software idea that comes out of free software under the sun. They could then just release the patents with some kind of liberal license, with a revocation clause.

This would give you two things... it would supposedly prevent other companies from patenting the same thing, and it would also give us a portfolio a-la IBM to use as defense... as in if these guys try to sue squid, the EFF comes in and says "well we have a patent on using the color red on menus... so if you sue squid we will revoke your patent license and sue you!" Stupid example but you get the idea.

Re:The EFF should patent stuff

[femto]

There is no need for EFF/FSF to patent stuff.

Instead, EVERYONE should be writing 'Free' patents on every idea under the sun and publishing them far and wide. Once it is published, it's prior art. Surely 100,000 geeks can match a bunch of lawyers? We have the advantage that we don't have to pay for 'free patents' and there is no red tape.

Maybe EFF/FSF's contribution can be to set up a wiki which can be used to make a permanant, easily searchable, record of all these ideas?

I guess such a scheme addresses the 'prevention aspect' but doesn't address the 'bargaining' aspect.

If a patent is only gong to be used as a bargaining chip, it probably doesn't have to be particlarly strong, so it might be possible to D.I.Y. and eliminate legal fees. That way, it might be affordable to patent some of the 'better' ideas.

Re:The EFF should patent stuff

[nzyank]

Sorry...I don't see where the 'interesting' mods come from unless maybe the poster has 5 aliases. Last I heard it cost $20k a pop to get a patent through. That's not counting the $3000 some companies like HP pay the inventor for filing (or at least they used to). I don't know much about the EFF financial situation, but I seriously doubt that they're going to come up with that kind of money. And the funny part is that they don't have to. If they publish the idea it becomes prior art and no one else can get an enforceable patent on the idea anyways. So maybe what you meant to say was that the EFF should start publishing this stuff?

These guys are still around?

[AndrewNelson]

I worked for MII a few years ago (the company I worked for was bought out by them) and everything I saw indicated they were on their way to destruction and should make their time.

The Vik brothers have been using MII as part of a shell game for years - I wonder when they got the bright idea to try and make money with it?

Anti-Patent or Anti-Process?

[pmiller396]

Whoa, wait a minute here.

There are a lot of people, myself included, who think that the problem lies with the way software patents are researched and granted in the US, not necessarily with software patents by themselves. Not to mention the fascination US companies have with taking everything to court.

IANAL, but I believe there are at least two main tests that should be applied before granting a patent: (1) it should be new, and (2) it should not be obvious.

The first test looks at "prior art": is this a common practice or is this really novel and unique? Many software patents have been given for things that are very commonplace: the online "shopping cart", using XOR to draw a cursor on a graphics screen, and now (possibly) caching Internet content. The Patent Office seems to be doing a particularly poor job of making sure that software techniques being patented are actually new and different. It seems to stem from a huge number of applications coupled with a fundamental lack of understanding about software.

The second test, that it is not obvious, is a little more confusing, at least to me. Things that are obvious to programmers probably aren't obvious to, forgive me, normal people.

Having said all that, I'm sure that some people disagree with software patents altogether. I'll let them explain their point of view.

Stop the madness...

[andreMA]

Regardless of how original an idea might be, USPTO should be required to consider the economic impact of granting a patent. Patents are often a useful thing and used properly do spur innovation by rewarding inventors, but that needs to be balanced against harm to others. That balance seems to be sorely lacking at times.

I wonder if there's any way for victims of patent extortion involving patents which have later been overturned can engage in a class action lawsuit against USPTO and force a more careful review of patent applications to eliminate nonsense like this? Let alone recovering damages... Somehow I think it's likely that they've made themselves immune from such, however.

Power without accountability is not the same as taxation without representation, but it has a similar sour taste...

Just my 2 cents as a Patent Attorney

[Compulawyer]

I just read claim 1 in this patent (traditionally, claim 1 is the broadest claim in the patent) and my first thought was that this patent has to have a heck of a prosecution history with a lot of comments that will narrow the interpretation of this claim in order for this to have been allowed. Then again, the filing date is 1999 and I don't know how much caching was being done then.

Bottom line: SOMEONE had to invent caching. It very well could have been these guys. But if they approached one of my clients with an offer to license this thing, I would want to do a LOT of investigation before advising one way or the other.

Evidence of transparent caching from August 1996

[lifegonehazy]

This is the earliest reference to transparent caching that I could find in the squid-users archive.