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."

Comments

That's a great idea!

[Cassius Corodes]

That's a great idea! Why didn't I think of that? Luckily I've still got my patent for a water holding container.

Re:That's a great idea!

[rolfwind]

But does it match my patent for the water holding container with mouth interface?

Re:That's a great idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bizarrely enough, a water holding container is more specific than many software patents. To make your example equivalent, it would be "a container (including but not limited to, cupping your hands, a hole in the ground, a cup) that can hold fluids, or other type of substance".
I.e they don't just cover a solution to a problem but, all conceivable solutions within a "problem space".

Example, the patents on natural order evaluation. In a spreadsheet (or any app where one element depends on the state of other elements) the elements has to be evaluated in the correct order. Now, the patent doesn't just cover solving this problem by recursion. It doesn't just cover solving it by sorting. It covers solving the problem at all.

But, looking for a bright side to all this, it's good that software patents are this crazy because the situation will become unstable to the point of collapse sooner or later.

Re:That's a great idea!

[AlecC]

Poor fellow - quoted out of context as always. What he actually said was words to the effect that "Anybody who refuses my budget increase must think that everything that can be invented has already been invented" i.e. the exact opposite of what eveybody thinks he said. He was applying to Congress for a bigger budget.

I hope....

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

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).

Re:I hope....

[pairo]

So... IBM is not a trademark? :-)

Unlikely to hold up

[acidrain]

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.

Re:Unlikely to hold up

[eli pabst]

O.K., bright boy. Build something better than S3. Open Source it, if you like. But first prove to me that your solution scales to an enterprise the size of Amazon.com. That it will be cheaper and more reliable. Then we can talk. How does the ability to perform some service well make it patentable? I could see if they came up with some novel way of making it scalable, but just being good at something doesn't make it patentable. I'd guess that someone had already combined a web interface with something like an NFS/AFS share long before S3.

Re:Unlikely to hold up

[Random BedHead Ed]

How well Amazon's implementation of the patent works is irrelevant in the subject of the patent's validity. If it were relevant, I could patent the wheel if the one I built were the shiniest.

Re:Unlikely to hold up

[Gr8Apes]

well, let's give you a couple of prior art examples:

Google's GMail - remember the GDrive plugin?
MS's Outlook Web Access (yes, I know) with Public Folders - web interface, large data storage capabilities, and certainly scales.

There's just 2, and one dates back to around 1997.

So, not only is this not innovative, it's not even original. Slapping different access around the concept or doing it slightly better isn't innovative. Or are you going to argue that a titanium mousetrap is better because it's lighter and the trapping mechanism more rigid and more likely to snap the rodent's neck? That's not innovative, it's a refinement.

patents and standards

[dshk]

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.

Obvious 75 times

[niceone]

Wow, I usually take a quick look at the claims in patent stories to see if the patents are really as bad as the headline. In this case I can't say I read all of them - there are 75 freakin' claims! But the ones I did manage to read I couldn't see anything that wasn't obvious. Here's the first claim for example:

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

Surely someone's done a redundant db with a web services interface before? How else could they have done it than that?

Re:Obvious 75 times

[kripkenstein]

Surely someone's done a redundant db with a web services interface before? How else could they have done it than that? You see, this is what happens when non-lawyers read patents. Now, I am not a lawyer either, but I at least read what Wikipedia says about this matter. As I understand it, claim #1 that you mention is an 'independent' claim. Later claims (some of those 74) are 'dependent' claims. They refine and specify what the independent claim states.

So, yes, the independent claim #1 is very broad. It probably wouldn't hold up in a court. But since no legal precedent exists, Amazon don't know if it will or not. So they keep it as independent claim #1. If in fact prior art invalidates it, then the patent still pertains to whatever the far-more-specific dependent claims #2-#75 refer to. Presumably a very specific manner of implementing #1. Amazon actually hope to patent that specific implementation, but they write it in this notation of independent-dependent claims because that is how patents are written.

But, as I said, IANAL. So perhaps we all shouldn't speculate too much.

It's a crazy patent world after all...

[RuBLed]

From the Abstract:

A system may include a web services interface configured to receive, according to a web services protocol, a given client request for access to a given data object, the request including a key value corresponding to the object...

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...

Prior art - memcached

[seifried]

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!)

Web services?

[eric76]

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.

Example

[Jaaay]

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.

Last week me not spel patent xmainer now am 1

[BillGatesLoveChild]

> 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.

Park Place - the Open Source S3 clone

[complex]

Hurry, grab Park Place, the Open Source clone of S3, before it is gone.

Park Place is written in Ruby by Why.

Re:Simple combinations

[MojoRilla]

...Simple combinations of existing technologies are exactly what 90% of patents are. Even some legitimate.

Due to the recent Supreme Court ruling, simple combinations of existing technologies are no longer patentable. The obviousness test has been strengthened, and no longer requires a "a "teaching, suggestion, or motivation" tying the earlier inventions together." According to Justice Kennedy, ""The results of ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the patent laws."

IANAL, but given this ruling, it appears that patents like the Amazon S3 one would fail under this new ruling.

"copycat" is an interesting word choice

[beegle]

"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.

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.

Prior Art

[jshriverWVU]

WebDAV?