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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 better not affect squid.
If it does, I can see a number of ISPs going belly up due to the increased cost of traffic.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
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 !
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
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.
I'm sorry, but our comnpany has patented First Posts. Our lawyers will be in touch shortly.
Oh, I see you have a different implementation (first Pists), but that means diddly squat nowadays doesn't it, bwah-ha-ha.
I am patenting a system for the moderation of online discussion boards using different models of messages and a scoring system that can allow users to browse only high-rated or sometimes-funny but nefariously modded down posts.
i ve
They will range like so:
Insightful
Funny
Offtopic
Troll
Informat
Flamebait
The scoring will range from a -2 though 5 basis, users may boost certain catagories of messages by as many points as they want, further allowing them to see what they want to see.
This system is free to use, but you must agree to the EULA
EULA:
Me ( Eric(b0mb)dennis ) hereby reserves the right to freely use any property you own, including, but not limited to:
Kitchen and/or pantry (I need to eat)
Toiletry (The bush just aint cutting it anymore)
Your personal computer(s) (My name is Juan and I am posting this message from a chicken coupe in The Country formally known as Iraq, i am using RFC 1149 in conjunction with a new form of animal telepathy to post this message -=patent pending=-)
I also reserve the right to change the moderation of any post I see fit.. (This should be modded +5 Troll, if it's not done, expect some SCO action on your butt)
Thank you, and please be sure to invite me over for dinner... 50,000 Dinas isn't even buying me a zucchini anymore
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
The patent
This is an Excellent example of why software patents are bad
Right now, if you are a European citizen, like I am, then Write to your European Member of Parliament (MEP), and tell them that you think software patents are a bad thing, and that they should vote against them on June 30th.
The forthcoming European vote was covered here on slashdot a few days ago, but did not make the front page, so did not get much coverage.
You can find a list of European Members of Parliament here To avoid annoying them, do write you your MEP, not to a party leader. If you have several, please take a look at which issues they cover, and chose the one that take an interest in trade/technology etc.
Remember, Write NOW! we don't want this sort of cr*p in
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?
Having worked with Mirror Image I have to say that the way Mirror Image is doing the caching differs strongly from Akamai's.
While Akamai is putting cache servers in many IP provider's locations (I think more than 5000 so far), Mirror Image is concentrating its caches in about 20 locations connected to the big exchange and peering points. The Mirror Image presenters were explicitely stressing this point and that this other approach is the key to Mirror Image's success. So I guess the patent covers the Mirror Image Way Of Doing Things rather than the idea to cache websites to speed up transfer rates.
Can you say 'patent infringement suit'?
Yeah, I bet Akamai even installed a vixie-cron job to launch the suit automatically in the next few days.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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...
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.
All you cache are now belong to us.
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?
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.
/ 02/03/16562 43&mode=nested&tid=95)
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 generally accepted term for this type of technology is "Content Distribution Networking" or "Content Delivery Networking". Akamai, Speedera, Digital Island etc. are Content Distribution companies which will (according to the necessary commercial agreements), take a customer's content and distribute it around their overlay CDNs. Generally speaking, these CDNs overlay the traditional Internet using co-located space in customer or exchange point datacentres. There are, however, some CDN organisations who take the approach of building their own infrastructure.
"Transparent Web Caching" on the other hand is generally a term applied to the transparent redirection of TCP port 80 IP traffic on access equipment through a set of HTTP proxy devices. This technique is used by many ISPs to force users to use their Webcaches even if the user thinks they are being clever by disabling the pre-defined HTTP Proxy settings in their Web browser.
Until recently, you could build your own CDN ($$$) using software from people such as Inktomi, but can still use devices from other manufacturers such as Network Appliance or Cisco Systems.
Contribute to the online videogame encyclopedia: GamerWiki
From the article: "Mirror Image developed the transparent Web caching patent in 1996"
From Mirror Images "About Us"
1997: Mirror Image Internet Inc. is founded.
The earliest date on the Patent itself is September 30, 1997.
IIRC Squid also was around in '97.
The exact dates will be interesting.
They might want to watch out, because from what I understand AOL has the world's largest internet cache system (all running Linux, actually). And I'd bet that it's been in place since before 1996.
'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.
You think computers are the only area of patent crapola? Try looking up "multiplication" in the USPTO website thingy... You'll find tons of patents for blatantly obvious [to a math nerd] algorithms [I've even seen Karatsuba's 1962 multiplication algorithm patented].
I imagine the same shit happens in other fields.
The problem with patents isn't the law. Isn't the idea of patents. Its the enforcement. Too many people filing too many patents has caused the patent office to stop caring whether the patent is valid or not.
What I think would be fun though is upto a $100K fine for patents which can be proven to be blatant rip offs, fakes or incompletes [e.g. patents on things not yet invented fully just to stifle competitors].
Then you will see companies like this really feel some pain.
To make it even more fun, whoever can prove the patent is a ripoff gets 10% of the fine. Make it a sport for the average citizen!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
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.
The patent is at Delphion (free registration required) and the USPTO. Paul Vixie is listed as an inventor but probably has no ownership rights, or even the ability to collect on royalties. So don't lynch him yet...
The first base (or independent) claim is:
Doesn't sound much like my understanding of how Akamai works (I didn't think Akamai "intercepted" requests -- the origin servers actually pointed to the cache servers in their img src tags). It does sound an awful lot like a transparent proxy however.
There's 36 claims, but only 3 are independent -- the rest are derived from those 3 (dependent claims). It's only the claims that are worth reading and worth worrying about. Press releases, abstracts and summaries are all irrelevant to what a patent actually covers. I find them more confusing than useful.
Let's concentrate on the 3 independent claims then. Here's the other 2:
15. A system for transferring information via the Internet, comprising:
36. A method for efficiently delivering cached information to Internet users, comprising the steps of:
As you can see, the differences between these claims are very subtle. I'd need to spend more time reading those claims to understand
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 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...
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
It looks to me like Mirror Image's original "transparent supercache" system is what's described in this newest patent (not so much their Content Delivery Network). The patent looks like its fairly broadly worded, and probably covers some similar models too, but on the other hand, they cite plenty of prior art in their own patent. So overall I would guess that "ordinary" transparent caching is not covered by this patent, but then again IANAL, and in particular IANAPA.
Mirror Image's original business plan was to provide a client-side supercache service to client-side ISPs in places where upstream bandwidth was scarce/expensive (ie, Europe in the 90s). MII would 'mirror' popular high traffic (American) content onto supercaches located just a few hops from the ISPs. ISPs subscribing to the MII service could then configure their proxies to do a "look aside" and access popular content from the local MII supercache rather than have to sent requests across the ocean and pull the content all the way back. It worked nicely for ISPs that needed it, but there were fewer and fewer client-side ISPs willing to pay for access to the MII supercaches. So MII expanded into the server-side part of the caching business: "Content Delivery Networks".
In 2001, MII bought an existing CDN technology company (Clearway Technologies) and in the process acquired a nifty server-side software agent (your choice of Apache module or IIS plug-in) that automatically "Mirrorizes" *coughcoughlikeAkamizescough* all of the output from an origin Web server, so getting your server's content onto the MII CDN only takes a couple of minutes and you don't have to alter any of your Web content. That agent and its associated methods are covered by the other patents mentioned in MII's press release.
Personally, I believe that if MII wanted to sue Akamai for patent infringement, they probably could make a case for it these days, but --as always-- it's unclear that that would be the best use of their resources.
-Mark Kriegsman
Former Chief Scientist, Mirror Image Internet;
Founder, Clearway Technologies;
Inventor, US Patents 5,991,809, 6,370,580 and 6,480,893 (now assigned to MII)
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.
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.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
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!
Ok, I'm not anywhere familiar with reading patents, but as far as I can guess, we have plenty of prior art.
From reading the basics of it, and having almost gone into convulsions for attempting to understand it, heres what I can gather.
Re-directing a user to an "alternate address" is covered. So it doesn't have to be transpartent in the proxy sence, the client can be re-directed.
We all know CPAN, right?
CPAN redirects you to a mirror automatically. Thus CPAN is covered by this patent, if I read correctly that redirection is considered 'transparent'. CPAN also had a 'local copy' that you may have been redirected to. Further making it appear to be more of a 'proxy'. CPAN was created in 1995, two years prior to this patent.
There are hundred of other sites that were using this method prior to that, all prior to the patent.
AOL uses proxies, as does many countries (China anyone?), anyone know when they were first setup?
This is the earliest reference to transparent caching that I could find in the squid-users archive.