Slashdot Mirror
Amazon S3 is Patent-Pending
theodp writes "If your startup is counting on a copycat service to emerge for Amazon S3 disaster recovery, you might want to start thinking about a Plan C. On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that Amazon wants a patent for its Distributed storage system with web services client interface invention, aka Amazon Simple Storage Service."
That's a great idea! Why didn't I think of that? Luckily I've still got my patent for a water holding container.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
The crap video card manufacturor from the 90s sues Amazon for trademark infringement, it'd be spurious, but *shrugs*, so's this patent (and all software patents).
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
If this is the simple combination of existing technologies it shouldn't be enforceable. "Distributed storage system..." check. "Web services client interface..." yeah we have that too. Sorry no patent, that is specifically excluded. Then again American law seems to be for sale, and Amazon has a history of bullying the patent office.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Open technologies/standards should be licensed in such a way that the license can be revoked if a licensee patents something using that technology. So if Amazon patents a storage system which uses web services then they are not allowed to use web services anymore. However this doesn't help against patent troll companies as they are not interested in creating any useful thing. Hopefully these trolls will sue Amazon for a few billion dollars very soon.
Surely someone's done a redundant db with a web services interface before? How else could they have done it than that?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Hey, we're doing this everyday right? I had used webservices to send and receive all sorts of objects before, text, images, passwords in plain text and stores/reads them from a storage where I use a key value to access it...
...Simple combinations of existing technologies are exactly what 90% of patents are. Even some legitimate.
I personally dislike the patent system (patents last too long, have too many and are too restrictive) but the, "They just put a spring and a board together! Why anybody could have thought of that mouse trap thing," argument is wearing a little thin.
I can think of some very similar products/etc, for example memcached:
http://www.danga.com/memcached/
You can have multiple memcached servers servicing multiple front ends (just ask wikipedia.org!)
It keeps mentioning "web services". I assume that refers explicitly to something like using existing http and related protocols to encode files and transmitting them over port 80.
... .
The Web refers to the World Wide Web. It has nothing to do with other protocols such as SMTP, POP3, IMAP, NTP, NNTP, SSH, telnet, FTP, echo, finger, gopher, named,
So if you roll your own protocol to accomplish the same thing, I don't see that it would violate this patent, if it is even enforceable.
Take away the web services portion and much of this looks like enterprise wide backup software done back in the mid 1990's by companies such as IBM and Mission Critical Software. Of couse, they may have their own patents on the procedure. Maybe the use of "web services" is to distinguish Amazon's patent from theirs or from the literature on the subject.
"How does it feel to be someone's tool?"
If it turned out you're from the UK, I'd laugh. Bewteen Tony Blair and CCTV, you don't have many stones to throw. If, one day, you're walking down the streets, and you hear the 1812 Overature.... RUN.
s/Tony Blair/Gordon (W) Brown/
Smile, don't click...
There should be no way Amazon can get a patent for somenthing that is so commonly used nowadays, but I have seen the most extrange things happen in the The Twilight Patent Zone.
Web Design Marbella Paginas Web
Which is...
Not unlike.. http://www.openafs.org/
Which is the open version of the Andrew File System, about which wikipedia says..
"Additionally, a variant of AFS, the Distributed File System (DFS) was adopted by the Open Software Foundation in 1989 as part of their Distributed computing environment.'
Patenting distributed storage? Sounds too generic.
Patenting an API - can't patent software here.
So as long as your start up isn't in the US, I don't see a problem. Stupid American software patents.
Follow me
If your startup is counting on a copycat service to emerge for Amazon S3 disaster recovery, you might want to start thinking about a Plan C
Only if you limit yourself to services provided by countries where software patents are upheld. Fortunately that's not a global situation (yet).
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Example of why patent reform cant happen. Most problems with the system could be fixed by replacing the idiots with people who wont look at this sort of obvious nonsense but these guys like Amazon have the money and a vested interest in abusing the system like this so unless overnight 100 million people make this a campaign issue it just cant happen. It's a pretty sad situation because in theory patents are a very good idea, so if some poor guy invents some amazing genuine invention he cant get usurped by big companies and can profit from his brains. Of course in practice this isn't working out so well the last decade in particular.
> a Amazon Simple Storage Service.
In Computing, Simple == Obvious. Patents should be new, useful, novel and not-obvious. http://www.bitlaw.com/patent/requirements.html
S3 has been done before and often and like Amazon's previous patents, this one has a high "Duh" factor. But Amazon must know that. The problem with patents and laws in general is that big companies and government know they can do something wrong and get away with it for a long time. Even if it's reversed in the distant future, mission accomplished.
I dream of a day where computing systems are designed by computer scientists, not lawyers.
"Sorry, we've patented 'catching mice or other nuisance animals in a container that may or may not result in the expiration of the involved lifeform'" so you can't trap mice: we've patented it...
I assume Amazon aren't using Linux kernel code in this, because if they are aren't they in violation of the GPL? (seious question, i don't know - maybe because they aren't distributing it they are in the clear?)
Hurry, grab Park Place, the Open Source clone of S3, before it is gone.
Park Place is written in Ruby by Why.
If you invent something of value the government will take it from you and deny all knowledge of you. After that the technology is taken and distributed to companies that get to build the prototypes and products. Ususally for "defense" (offense) related purposes. Stanley Meyers (Ohio) is a good example. Touted as the inventor of the water car he just came up with a much better (more efficiant) way of cracking hydrogen out of water, oh yeah and adapted it to a regular gas (combustion engine) powered vehicle. He had patents but never benifited from them, and niether have we. I think he is dead now.
... on the merits of this case yet. That means an examiner HASN'T yet looked at the application.
This is merely the 18 month publication of the application. It's very likely that this isn't going to issue the way it is now. It's very typical to start with the broadest claims that seem reasonable.
It's too late now to file 3rd party materials. So, watch the application through public PAIR and once you see a notice of allowance, then start to scream. Don't worry, that'll probably won't happen, if at all, until like another 2 years.
On the previous Slashdot patent post I was suggesting a way of formalising the prior art. Like lots of people have said in the threads here "surely someone has done X before" the problem is that if you can't prove it was published externally and could have been read by other people then it doesn't count as Prior Art in a patent application.
Blog and tag those obvious ideas.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Like most of the Slashdot hive-mind, I believe strongly that the patent system is broken and is in need of serious reform.
However, I do think that the concept behind patents is good: Give people with innovative new ideas a monopoly for a few years so that they might recover some of their development costs. (I'd make the time period of the patent much shorter and make a bunch of other adjustments that aren't relevant here.)
If competing services really are "copycats", they're exactly the sort of thing that patents were designed to prevent. Whether they're copycats (or if Amazon is copying other existing technology) is a more interesting question.
--
Does my post for an idea like this on the forums for Apple's "american-idol-type-thing" last year count as prior art?
46487 466780 252994 376409 96920 39622 205366 244315 622115 512361 668040 63608 259203 955314 811176 652718 166330 23922
They do nothing for humanity. They're a one-sided attempt to sequester and restrict the free flow and exchange of ideas in the world, giving nothing in return. Zilch.
Message to Amazon: you're out of line. Either fire your patent lawyers, or fire the parasitic moron that is giving them instructions.
but it seems to me that to many companies are using obviousness in their claims and are trying to
patent the 'stack' of ideas, which is really obvious given that they are just using standard tools
to make a product so why make claims like this in the patent:
Honestly, why not try to pattent using C++ for making applications...
I'm not sure how much of this is covered but here might be some Prior Art:
http://eyeos.org/about
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/cheap-pc/zonbu-to-roll
Money is the root of all evil?
Hey, I'm sure there is a lot of a prior art for that (say GMailFS?), but it seems not the thing that the Amazon is after. Even if all the big-bosses in Web industry (like Google) can invalidate the patent, they may also prefer entering not-to-sue covenant with Amazon... because the cost of lawsuit eliminates most small startups from the playing field! So Amazon entered the obvious service market first, and they perfectly know, that as soon as that service commoditizes, there will be much more competition in the Web 2.0 industry. Obviously no big internet company wants that. It is easiest to enter the market first, block it with patents and discourage small guys that may have opened another dot-com revolution.
That murder is frowned upon. Everytime I read some of this ridiculous stuff anymore, I just find myself wanting to eliminate whoever it is who came up with and then pushed said idea. I consider that more benefit to the people and sadly our 'For the people' doesn't care anymore.
Unlike many other Slashdotters, I do believe that software should be patentable. But only truly INNOVATIVE things. This doesn't qualify.
That's SDSC's Storage Resource Broker, and while I didn't read every point in the patent application, what I read I thought "yeah, sounds like SRB written in vague terms to me."
I know some prior art which would strike some of these claims.
Distributed storage system: dCache, http://www.dcache.org/. This allows one to configure storage as multiple commodity storage servers at one site (up to several petabytes) or distributed over several sites (as used by NorduGrid).
One of the many protocols dCache supports is SRM (Storage Resource Manager), which is a web-services (SOAP) based protocol which allows you to perform your usual copy/delete/ls. It's designed as a generic protocol which several distributed systems implement.
Finally, SRM v2.2 (whose published spec at least predates the patent application, if not any of the big implementations) also has the concept of "Storage Classes" which allows the user to specify how the file should be stored (temporary with lifetime X, on tape, on disk, on disk with multiple replicas, etc).
Plus, Globus has been doing web-services storage for years, if not among a single "distributed" system - unless you count the grid as the system. Finally, the SRB from UCSD also implements a lot of these claims.
If the patent examiner is competent, many of these claims will be struck down and the patent will be refiled with a much narrower scope. Hopefully he's reading this very article!
Amazon Simple Storage Service = A.S.S. Service
What was their slogan again? "The biggest store on earth"
Amazon S3 wouldn't even seem like a 'web interface' to most people... for the average user you'd still need an actual, usable user interface -- such as the web interface http://s3interface.com/
WebDAV?
Having actually used S3 (its hard to beat the price!) a quick-and-dirty summary is that its essentially WebDAV with a proprietary protocol - at least on the front end. But, rather than use proprietary HTTP verbs like WebDAV did, they used web services (both REST and SOAP). If they want to patent their proprietary protocol, fine. But for a general process of remotely accessing objects over HTTP... sorry, no. Maybe if S3 used something other than URL's to be the object key, but they don't. You can't call a directory a "bucket", call a file an "object" and expect us to believe you invented something! Trademark those words for your particular web service if you like, but its hardly an invention.
As for the backend, maybe Amazon did something unique, but I'd be surprised. NAS isn't exactly new, even if they have the biggest bestest darn NAS there is.
So, yet another brilliant "invention" from Amazon.
I have a patent for:
A method of generating a tree hierarchy display of error logs received from network devices and applications, each of the logs including a brief description of error cause and predetermined higher level ones of the logs being created in response to generation of predetermined combinations of lower level ones of the logs in accordance with user defined rule set criteria. The method comprises the steps of generating a user interface for entering explanations associated with predetermined ones of the error logs, storing the lower level ones of the logs used in meeting the rule set criteria, and displaying a tree hierarchy of the logs for any fully satisfied rule set criteria by attaching links between the logs in relation to the rule set criteria.
And to be perfectly honest, I don't even know what that means. We created a parser that would read a log file on a real time system and parse based on rules specified in an XML file. The lower level results are based on a ranking system defined within the rules. (Condition A = rank 1, Condition B = rank 2)
The patent office never actually looked at our work. They just looked at the big pile of crapola we wrote as our description and thought - well, that sounds confusing, but they filed. Give them a patent.
.. an ASSS why do I need thiers? (ROTFLOL)
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Lamers.
I didn't realize a new pm meant erasing the history of the one before!
Umm... WebDAV?
The claims to look at are: 1, 28 and 55 which I have included here for reference.
1. A system, comprising: a plurality of computing nodes configured to implement: a web services interface configured to receive, according to a web services protocol, client requests for access to data objects, wherein a given one of said client requests for access to a given one of said data objects includes a key value corresponding to said given data object; a plurality of storage nodes configured to store replicas of said data objects, wherein each of said replicas is accessible via a respective locator value, and wherein each of said locator values is unique within said system; a keymap instance configured to store a respective keymap entry for each of said data objects, wherein for said given data object, said respective keymap entry includes said key value and each locator value corresponding to each stored replica of said given data object; and a coordinator configured to receive said client requests for access to said data objects from said web services interface, wherein in response to said given client request, said coordinator is configured to access said keymap instance to identify one or more locator values corresponding to said key value and, for a particular one of said one or more locator values, to access a corresponding storage node to retrieve a corresponding replica.
28. A method, comprising: receiving client requests for access to data objects via a web services interface according to a web services protocol, wherein a given one of said client requests for access to a given one of said data objects includes a key value corresponding to said given data object; storing replicas of said data objects on a plurality of storage nodes, wherein each of said replicas is accessible via a respective locator value, and wherein each of said locator values is unique within said system; storing a respective keymap entry for each of said data objects, wherein for said given data object, said respective keymap entry includes said client-specified key value and each locator value corresponding to each stored replica of said given data object; and in response to receiving said given client request, accessing said respective keymap entries to identify one or more locator values corresponding to said key value and, for a particular one of said one or more locator values, accessing a corresponding storage node and retrieving a corresponding replica.
55. A computer-accessible medium comprising instructions, wherein the instructions are executable to: process client requests for access to data objects, wherein said client requests for access to said data objects are received via a web services interface according to a web services protocol, and wherein a given one of said client requests for access to a given one of said data objects includes a key value corresponding to said given data object; instruct that replicas of said data objects be stored on a plurality of storage nodes, wherein each of said replicas is accessible via a respective locator value, and wherein each of said locator values is unique within said system; and instruct that a respective keymap entry for each of said data objects be stored, wherein for said given data object, said respective keymap entry includes said client-specified key value and each locator value corresponding to each stored replica of said given data object; wherein processing said given client request includes accessing said respective keymap entries to identify one or more locator values corresponding to s
http://www.cleversafe.com/
We don't have to pay a license fee because, while our system may have several similar benefits in case of a disaster, we call it 'clustering' and its just to improve data retrieval performance.
Now if someone would just think of a semantic twist for the word 'patent'.
There is already an open source clone of the api called parkplace done
.net, oracle, whatever... .. do you think the likely customers for your service want
in ruby/rails.
http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/parkplace
btw, O'Reilly book "Restful Web Services" - a good read by the way.
has quite a bit of coverage of S3.
I *was* interested in S3, and have
been mulling over how it might fit in with some requirements I have..but
honestly, finding out about this patent just killed my interest. If I want
vendor lock in on my stack I would be developing with
Amazon, get a clue
vendor lock in? Those folks already have datacenters with Oracle/SANS,whatever
they aren't interested in having Amazon hosts their data. Startups that are using
open source - that's whose likely to be interested in your service.. think about it!
Kodak (ofoto.com) has been using a web service, front ended distributed storage system in house for 4 or 5 years now. They have *massive* reliable storage needs with TB upon TB of people's photos to store and print around the clock.
HTTP PUT and DELETE have existed for years.
WebDAV, anyone?
This is crazy.