Akamai Wins Lawsuit to Protect Obvious Patent

brandaman writes "Akamai, the largest content delivery network (CDN) with about 70% market share, recently won its lawsuit against the against second largest CDN - Limelight Networks. The suit asserted that Limelight was infringing on Akamai's patent which, upon examination, seems to be somewhat on the obvious side. 'In accordance with the invention, however, a base HTML document portion of a Web page is served from the Content Provider's site while one or more embedded objects for the page are served from the hosting servers, preferably, those hosting servers near the client machine. By serving the base HTML document from the Content Provider's site, the Content Provider maintains control over the content.' Limelight is obviously not pleased, and this is not the first lawsuit Akamai has won regarding its patents."

Comments

Against the Against?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever. Good summary.

I'm in trouble now.

[palegray.net]

I guess I'd better shut down BlogPuzzles.net immediately, since it obviously infringes on Akamai's patent. My site allows people to host a base HTML document, with embedded content (puzzles) being hosted on my servers. This is clearly unlicensed use of Akamai's intellectual property. While I'm at it, I'd better warn Google before they get involved in a real financial nightmare over content hosted on their servers and integrated into other peoples' websites. Now, where did I stick that attorney's phone number?

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Sorry, but you're not even close.

The way Akamai works is it distributes the "heavy duty" content like images, scripts. to its own servers all around the world. It then lets its customers (like E*Trade, to pick one actual example) modify their static HTML content to refer to those images in a special way. For example, the E*Trade home page has the following link in it for one of its images:

https://a248.e.akamai.net/n/248/1777/20080228.0/www.etrade.com/images/prospect/topGrad.gif

The url is specially encoded in such a way that when your local DNS server queries a248.e.akamai.net, the DNS server returns a server located physically near you. So if you're in England a248.e.akamai.net might resolve to an IP located in Londan, but in New York City it would resolve to an IP somewhere in New York. Then when the http request is sent, Akamais servers decode that annoyingly long URL to determine which customer of theirs it is and serve up the correct image. It's actually a fairly complex and fast process. If the server that you're directed to doesn't actually have the image locally then that Akamai server will query another nearby Akamai server. If that server also doesn't have it then it'll actually pull the image down from a master server that E*Trade uploaded the image to.

You can test this out yourself by looking up the IP address of a248.e.akamai.net yourself. Locally you'll get one IP. If you do a google search for dns lookup tools you can submit that domain name to other sites to look it up and you'll get totally different IP's that are physically close to wherever that domain lookup tool runs from.

The bottom line is that it's a prety complex process that involves both the use of DNS to ensure you download large chunks of content from physically near servers as well as some pretty sophisticated caching in the background to make sure static content is delivered rapidly no matter where in the world you are.

I used to work at Akamai so I have a pretty good firsthand knowledge of how their stuff works. I doubt a lot of their algorithms they use would pass the "obviousness" test...

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[palegray.net]

GP was meant to be a humorous reference to the fact that most people around here only read the article summaries, not the article content itself. Good insights, though!

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[MobyDisk]

I used to work at Akamai so I have a pretty good firsthand knowledge of how their stuff works. I doubt a lot of their algorithms they use would pass the "obviousness" test... I'm reading the linked patent now, and I think the problem is that what is patented is not an algorithm, but a network architecture. This is furthermore a mucky issue because according to patent law, algorithms are not patentable. In the US "mental processes" are not patentable either. But the patent office grants "algorithm" patents so long as the submitter is implementing it in hardware or software. Oddly enough, even things like RLE are patented even though they can easily be done in your head.

I am not familiar with this particular case, but the big issue here is that Akamai might be trying to patent the general concept of distributing cache servers around the world. This is the kind of thing that the patent office should not allow. If I have a better way to do this, or even the same way, I should be allowed to do it. Akamai is the leader in this industry and they are well set and nobody is going to knock them off the map suddenly one day by copying them. They don't need patent protection. Furthermore, this is the kind of thing any group of competent developers can create, and 10 different groups would have 10 different ways of doing it. Even if a patent is appropriate here, it should not be used to squash similar competing services.

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[glwtta]

So if you're in England a248.e.akamai.net might resolve to an IP located in Londan, but in New York City it would resolve to an IP somewhere in New York.

Great. I wonder if the fact that DNS was specifically designed with this sort of thing in mind undermines Akamai's inventiveness here?

Of course it's pretty pointless speculating here, since TFA has exactly zero information about what's specifically being infringed here: could be something of substance, or could be the old "use a more or less complex implementation to get a ridiculously broad patent and then sue everyone solving the same problem" approach.

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[Cramer]

I doubt a lot of their algorithms they use would pass the "obviousness" test...

They might not have been very obvious when Akamai started, but they're pretty obvious today. Crafting a DNS response based on who asked has been common practice for several years now -- "views" in bind. Akamai blends what with web proxies and network geography to send you to a proxy logically close to you, obviously preferring proxies within your ISP's network. ('tho not all ISP's host Akamai cache servers, which is sorta stupid as they'll give them to you. and they can save a huge amount of bandwidth.)

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[calebt3]

Great job there, throwing a slashdot effect at a page border.

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[Tablizer]

according to patent law, algorithms are not patentable

They are now under the "business process" umbrella. The courts are accepting these so far.

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[Alsee]

The courts are accepting these so far.

Yeah, lower US courts decided to start allowing software patents.

However in the current Microsoft-AT&T case before the US Supreme Court the multiple justices were clearly skeptical of that behavior. In particular:

JUSTICE BREYER: I take it that we are operating under the assumption that software is patentable? We have never held that in this Court, have we?

MR. JOSEFFER [DOJ Atty]: No, but as I was saying before -

JUSTICE BREYER: So what should we do here? Should, if we are writing this, since it's never been held that it's patentable in this Court

I have read the Supreme Court rulings relating to software patents. The rulings were back in the early 80's or so, back before the lower courts went off on their software patent kick. It seems clear to me that the lower courts have ignored or directly violated several points of Supreme Court law in those rulings. It appears that the Supreme Court is looking to directly rule on the subject and reign in the aberrant lower courts.

-

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[Tablizer]

JUSTICE BREYER: So what should we do here? Should, if we are writing this, since it's never been held that it's patentable in this Court [end Breyer quote]... It seems clear to me that the lower courts have ignored or directly violated several points of Supreme Court law in those rulings. It appears that the Supreme Court is looking to directly rule on the subject and reign in the aberrant lower courts.

Chemistry and genes didn't used to be patentable, but they ended up that way anyhow after long arguments. I suspect software will be the same way in the end based on the trend.

Chemistry and software are not really that different philosophically, it's just the "CPU" is different. The laws of physics "execute" chemistry similar to how CPU's "execute" software. It's just a human-built CPU instead of a God-built one (nature's laws). Think about it...

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[hughperkins]

So you're saying that we're free to workaround this patent by simply rewriting the html itself with local image urls?

(Ooops, should have patented that last line I guess :-/ )

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[Alsee]

Think about it

I've spent plenty of time, as I said in my post I've actually read all of the Ssupreme Court rulings on the subject.

A number is not an "invention". An equation is not an "invention". A calculation is not an "invention". Mental information processing is not an invention. Mental information processing does not magically become a patentable invention when you OBVIOUSLY use a calculator to accelerate/automate it. Mental information processing does not magically become a patentable invention when you OBVIOUSLY use a computer to accelerate/automate it. Mental information processing does not magically become a patentable invention when you OBVIOUSLY do it on the internet to accelerate/automate it.

The Supreme Court has explicitly ruled that no possible algorithm can ever qualify as "novel" or "non-obvious" for patent purposes. Therefore no possible software can ever qualify as novel, no possible software can ever qualify as non-obvious, no possible software can ever be an invention. There is nothing novel or non-obvious in blatantly using an ordinary computer to carry out that "non-novel" "obvious" calculation. Sticking the words "on a computer" at the end of a mathematical information manipulation does not magically turn it into a patentable invention.

It doesn't matter if you are the first person to write down some particular number, it cannot be "novel". It doesn't matter how many digits long your number is, it cannot be "non-obvious". No possible math, no possible information processing, no possible mental process, no possible algorithm, no possible software, can ever be an invention. As the Supreme Court said, they can never qualify as novel or non-obvious for the same reason that laws of physics are never treated as novel or non-obvious for patent purposes. An invention may make use of gravity, but G=M1*M2/R^2 is not an invention and it is treated as non-novel and as obvious, even if you are the first person to figure it out.

Chemistry and software are not really that different philosophically

No matter how long I *think* about a chemical reaction I will never actually make any molecules.

Physical objects and physical processes are philosophically different than math/calculations/mental-processes.
Physical objects and physical processes are concretely different than math/calculations/mental-processes.

-

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[sglines]

I used to work at Akamai too - they use squid in their caching servers and anycast DNS to yield the topologically local server. Anyone could easily duplicate what they do ... with enough cash to buy 10,000 or so cheap boxes.

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[udippel]

I've spent plenty of time, as I said in my post I've actually read all of the Ssupreme Court rulings on the subject.

Okay, so then you can enlighten me, the half-knowing. To my knowledge the whole mess started with the Supreme Court rebuking the USPTO in the Diamond vs. Diehr case, where the USPTO was kind of ordered to grant a patent on essentially software. Yes, I read the patent and some resources around it. Yes, the Supreme Court held the earlier appeals for non-patentable. Though in Diamond vs. Diehr they decided

On the other hand, when a claim containing a mathematical formula implements or applies that formula in a structure or process which, when considered as a whole, is performing a function which the patent laws were designed to protect (e. g., transforming or reducing an article to a different state or thing), then the claim satisfies the requirements [...]

And there was nothing new in the matter, if I am not mistaken, in curing rubber. But the formula as executed on a general purpose computer, in combination, was considered patentable. True, in the sense of 'software patents' the Supreme Court never endorsed such as singular patentable items. To me, it was a mistake nevertheless, a huge mistake to leave the formulation as is. Software as mathematical formula was still thrown out, but in real life, also in the first year of the 'PC' (1981), software would never be written not to be run on a (general purpose) computer. Literally, the Supreme Court did not allow software patents, de facto it invited them. In hindsight, one might assume a higher level of foresight by the creme of the creme of judges than to leave the indecisive, sorry, blurb that they produced. "implements or applies that formula in a structure or process" is so generally crappy that I am asking, seriously, wasn't this exactly opening the can of worms? Am I right when I assume that to disallow software patents as such, but to instruct software in combination with a computer as patentable, to be indecisive because both belong together: software needs a computer to run and a computer needs software to do something useful?
Only recently (I am too lazy to look up the details, it was something about brakes) have they decided that combining a well-known feature of 50 years ago with a well-known recent feature (microcontroller) to achieve the expected effect was obvious.

It seems you want to shift the blame to the lower courts. Maybe you can. But when a judge in a lower court would try to get the gist out of that ruling, she could in principle only arrive at the conclusion that software to be run on hardware would be novel and inventive. The tragedy of that Diamond vs Diehr case was, AFAICS, that the result was not unexpected: curing rubber. Only in a slightly different manner. The case law therefore was clear: An expected outcome, achieved through a novel combination of a non-novel general purpose computer with a non-novel algorithm developed into a sequence of code, fulfills the requirement of 101.

Correct me if I see this in a wrong light.

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[MikeFM]

I just compare the registered location of the user's IP to my list of caches and serve up the one closest. Seems far easier than special URL's to me.

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[Alsee]

The reasoning explained in a Supreme Court ruling is far more important than the raw direction of the ruling itself. Diamond vs. Diehr is a classic case of certain courts and many people running astray based on the raw direction of the ruling while missing what the Supreme Court actually said.

A first critical point to note is that Diamond vs. Diehr was a 5-4 decision. That does not diminish the validity and force of the ruling, but one has to be extremely wary of reading 5-4 decisions in an expansive manner. If you do not tread carefully, if you step a toe beyond the meaning and effect intended by anyone of the 5 Justice majority, then you immediately fall down. In this case many people - including the lower courts - took an extremely close very qualified ruling and went running with it. People ignored the intent of the majority, ignored the limitations imposed by the majority, ignored the explicit warnings made by the majority, and took the borderline point as a starting point for a sprint beyond the line rather than an end line. And of course they also failed to be informed by the minority opinion.

Look at exactly what the Supreme Court stated they were ruling upon:
We granted certiorari to determine whether a process for curing synthetic rubber which includes in several of its steps the use of a mathematical formula and a programmed digital computer is patentable subject matter under 35 U.S.C. 101.

The majority ruling was intended to support the very simple proposition that "a claim drawn to subject matter otherwise statutory does not become nonstatutory because a computer is involved". The majority stated "our present conclusion that a claim drawn to subject matter otherwise statutory does not become nonstatutory simply because it uses a mathematical formula".

The Supreme Court ruled that a physical process for curing rubber is patentable subject matter. Period. Whether a computer is used or not.
"Analyzing respondents' claims according to the above statements from our cases, we think that a physical and chemical process for molding precision synthetic rubber products falls within the 101 categories of possibly patentable subject matter. That respondents' claims involve the transformation of an article, in this case raw uncured synthetic rubber, into a different state or thing cannot be disputed.

The very simple proposition that a physical industrial process for curing rubber is not removed from being patentable subject matter simply because you happen to use some math equation along the way.

The majority explicitly state that "insignificant post-solution activity will not transform an unpatentable principle into a patentable process" and explicitly warn "To hold otherwise would allow a competent draftsman to evade the recognized limitations on the type of subject matter eligible for patent protection".

The lower courts have directly violated that explicit warning.

The majority cited the rule that "Transformation and reduction of an article 'to a different state or thing' is the clue to the patentability of a process claim". The lower courts are completely ignoring that. The Supreme Court was explicitly ruling for patents only on physical processes for "matter to be transformed and reduced to a different state or thing".

A very common mistake is that people think the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the patent itself, people mistakenly think that the Supreme Court ruled this patent valid. The majority explicitly went out of their way to make clear they were doing no such thing.
"In this case, it may later be determined that the respondents' process is not deserving of patent protection because it fails to satisfy the statutory conditions of novelty under 102 or nonobviousness under 103. A rejection on either of these grounds does not affect the determination that respondents' claims recited subject matter which was eligible for patent protection under 101."

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[Tablizer]

Well, I disagree there is any real difference between a math formula and a chemical formula. The laws of physics are one big CPU. But it would take too much typing to argue my point and I'm not in the mood. Consider this: what if one makes a chemical formula that makes a computer that executes an algorithm?

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[Alsee]

Do you think I am misrepresenting or misunderstanding the Supreme Court ruling on the subject?
Or do you just reject the Supreme Court's ruling on the subject?

I disagree there is any real difference between a math formula and a chemical formula.

You can't patent a chemical formula.

You can patent a novel and non-obvious specific physical process for transforming one physical material into a different material. You can't invent or patent a chemical formula, you can invent and patent one particular industrial process for manufacturing that chemical.

If someone wants to create the same chemical via a different physical process, they can do so.

With software, we're talking about a patent on the idea of carrying out some calculation. In this software patent regime, I can literally sit here motionless and just THINKING about some information and calculating some result, and be guilty of a patent thoughtcrime.

Consider this: what if one makes a chemical formula that makes a computer that executes an algorithm?

A paperclips is a patentable invention.
A computer is a patentable invention.

If you invent a new and different physical design paperclip, you can certainly patent that.
If you invent a new and different physical design computer, you can certainly patent that.

Anyone building that physical object or preforming that physical industrial process would be an infringement.

-

Re:I'm in trouble now.

[udippel]

Hi, get 5 mod points for being really insightful. I don't have any at the moment, but I'd give all to you.

Thanks!

It may be obvious but

[Gonoff]

As I am not a lawyer, it was not obvious to me what they were patenting.

Is this patenting having the html on one server and the rest (pictures etc) on other ones?

If it is that, I think there should be some prior art in the original stuff from Tim Berners-Lee.

Re:It may be obvious but

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this patenting having the html on one server and the rest (pictures etc) on other ones?

Apparently only in the specific case of having the "other ones" be distributed across the network and with the "closest" server to the client chosen to download the content from.

I suppose that things like mirrors, etc. don't count because in that case the user typically chooses what they believe to be the closest server rather than the host or akamai.

Re:It may be obvious but

[gatzke]

I can't find it, but somebody patented storage in the door of a refrigerator. That seems obvious, but a true improvement. They had 17 years to exploit the monopoly on refrigerators with door storage.

My wife worked at a paper company. They had patents on how to cut cardboard to make containers (french fry boxes, etc)

Obvious stuff can be patented.

Re:It may be obvious but

[Anonymous Coward]

Obvious stuff can be patented. In practice. In theory, that's not supposed to happen. But the patent system, like the cake, is a lie. Patent monopolies exist to prevent free markets.

People pereenially confuse the theory of the patent system (reward the poor starving inventors) with its actual empirical effects (allowing corporatist elites to control innovation and the very direction of a technological society).

Re:It may be obvious but

[Iphtashu Fitz]

It's a combination of modified URL's in the static HDML, DNS trickery that causes those URL's to be downloaded from servers physically close to you, and smart caching of that content. It basically provides a way of ensuring that static content like images, which take up a lot of bandwidth compared to HTML documents, is downloaded from servers physically near you and not from the companies primary server. It dramatically speeds up the loading of web pages no matter where the requests come from, and offloads a lot of processing & network utilization from the site serving up the HTML.

I posted more details in a reply here if you want a little more insight into how they do it.

Re:It may be obvious but

[the eric conspiracy]

Cutting boxes to minimize waste and facilitate processing can be solutions to VERY nonobvious problems easily desrving patents.

Re:It may be obvious but

[tambo]

As I am not a lawyer, it was not obvious to me what they were patenting.

Let's start first with the definition of "obviousness." Patent law doesn't go by the common English or Webster's definitions of the term - it has a very technical meaning, refined by probably a thousand patent law cases. Many nuances. And unhelpfully, the definitive section on the topic is circularly defined.

At least two reasons for the technicalities. First, virtually anything is "obvious" in hindsight. Second, what is "obvious" to one (unbiased) person may be completely non-obvious to another (unbiased) person, and the patent office would produce radically inconsistent results if examiners were permitted such subjectivity.

- David Stein

Re:It may be obvious but

[Anonymous Coward]

NOTHING "deserves" a patent. Patents should be abolished.

Re:It may be obvious but

[shadowkiller137]

no patents for major corporations should be abolished not ones for small inventors, if they aren't protected the major corporations will just steal the person's idea (which could be the only thing that could keep his family fed) for a percentage increase in their stock value

Re:It may be obvious but

[palegray.net]

What happens when the small inventor and his portfolio of a few patents starts a corporation that turns out to be highly successful?

Re:It may be obvious but

[Daniel Phillips]

Apparently only in the specific case of having the "other ones" be distributed across the network and with the "closest" server to the client chosen to download the content from. Without having read the patent (mea culpa) your description sounds damning in terms of obviousness and probability of prior art.

I have two issues with Akamai now: first, sitting front and centre in the evil patents problem, playing a starring role as a patent troll. Second, being a Linux freeloader. A grep of my lkml mailbox reveals zero Akamai email addresses. Not at all becoming a multibillion dollar business that built itself largely on the back of low cost Linux servers.

Re:It may be obvious but

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't steal an idea. That's another myth. Copying is not stealing. And do remember, the corporations wouldn't have patents to countersue the patentless inventor - right now, in most fields, for every one patent you have, the big boys will have hundreds or thousands, and you will almost certainly be violating one of them if you do anything. patents exist to change the market - without them, an innovator could come from nowhere and sweep through the market (established players being typically hidebound and risk averse), with patents people with ideas have to toady up to the establishment oligopoly. Sure, without patents the old guard will eventually copy, so you have to keep innovating to stay ahead. That's how a free market is supposed to work to the consumer's benefit (and we are all consumers, even producers).

Re:It may be obvious but

[Anonymous Coward]

...or when large corporations exploit the very, very simple loophole of having the patent filed by a shell company/subsidiary?

It would be good if someone could find some method of calculating exactly how much money a patented idea generates (including shifting the money between people/groups), and then limiting the amount of revenue earned by the sum of all your patents to some figure (say, $10M x 100% of production costs). Then, when the newest patent expires, the system is reset.

Re:It may be obvious but

[ColdGrits]

Is this patenting having the html on one server and the rest (pictures etc) on other ones?

No, it is absolutely NOTHING like that at all. I suggest you RTFA and RTFP and come back.

If it is that

It isn't.

Re:It may be obvious but

[sglines]

Tim Berners-Lee is on Akamai's board.

Re:It may be obvious but

[udippel]

What happens when the small inventor and his portfolio of a few patents starts a corporation that turns out to be highly successful?

Welcome to the club. This is exactly what the patent system was developed for. Nobody has any qualms about your arguments.

There is one serious trouble these days: It does exactly not work like this any longer, it does the opposite.
Even if your clever buddy has a few very clever patents, he will be sued into bankruptcy before his patents are held valid. He will be sued for infringing close to 1000 patents of the competitor, because his production line will be plastered with patents of the multinationals. Because the multinationals exchange their patent portfolios ('you may use mine and I may use yours') to hammer your guy with his few patents into the ground.
No, this is not overflow of fantasy. It is the daily happenings in the patent business. This is why it needs to be fdisk-ed. To - eventually - be recreated in a form and jurisdiction where "the small inventor and his portfolio of a few patents" will allow him, again, to start "a corporation that turns out to be highly successful".

Re:It may be obvious but

[dusanv]

It's true that they're not inconsistent or subjective. They consistently patent idiotic, obvious and redundant things. No subjectiveness or inconsistency there.

Re:It may be obvious but

[the eric conspiracy]

Right. Look at Akamai. The perfect counter-argument to your thesis.

Everything is obvious

[QuantumG]

in retrospect.

The sex and violence of a patent is in the claims. go read em and now look at the date the patent was filed: May 19, 1999.. which means it was being written for 6 to 8 months before that. You're saying that rewriting urls in a web page to fetch objects from geographically different servers was obvious in late 1998?

Not defending the patent system in the US or anything, but claiming that something is "obvious" now when the patent was filed in '99 is pretty freakin', well, obvious!

Re:Everything is obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

You're saying that rewriting urls in a web page to fetch objects from geographically different servers was obvious in late 1998?

Yes.

Well, maybe not if you were in high school then. But to people actually doing content delivery over the web, yes. And there were starting to be big web sites around even then.

Re:Everything is obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

You're saying that rewriting urls in a web page to fetch objects from geographically different servers was obvious in late 1998?

Yes its obvious. I remember discussing this in an ISP operators mailing list over 10 years ago.

Re:Everything is obvious

[prxp]

I had some pages back in 97 where many objects (mostly images) were loaded from geographically different servers. Do I get a piece of this? How should I proceed to get my money?

Re:Everything is obvious

[sonamchauhan]

> You're saying that rewriting urls in a web page to fetch objects
> from geographically different servers was obvious in late 1998?

Technically, yes. Remember Image bandwidth-stealing? A guy hosting images would find others not only presenting those images in a different website, but to add insult to injury, would load those images from _his_ servers? (i.e. they had modified their IMG tags to load images from the unwitting originator.) Now, if the originating servers were clustered and/or geographically distributed, you've got a setup just like Akamai.

This problem is almost as old as graphical browsers themselves.

Re:Everything is obvious

[rastoboy29]

No, it was way obvious by then.  You must not be old enough to remember.

And even so, it is in no way a brilliant idea.  I was making web pages with content sucked from multiple sites in 1994, and I was no genius.

It may not be obvious to a non-technical judge or jury, however, even today.

Re:Everything is obvious

[bit01]

in retrospect.

No it is not, and your hand waving is not helping. The PTO loves to push this self-serving nonsense as if it were fact. People are perfectly capable of evaluating whether something is obvious or not after the fact. They don't mystically lose their intelligence simply because they have more facts at their disposal.

This is obvious, if for no other reason than the HTTP/HTML protocols have built in the ability to get different elements of the one the page from different servers and to URL redirect a client from one server to another plus the address rewriting rules in popular servers like Apache. All of these capabilities existed for years before this "patent". Not to mention DNS referral, caching, network throttling etc. which existed for decades before this "patent". Don't be fooled by patent "claims" which list standard techniques together and then claim the assembly is somehow "different".

Face it, this "patent" is blindingly obvious to anybody with even basic training in networking. The fact that this got through just shows how incompetent the PTO is. Not surprising, given the chutzpah of claiming that the bureaucrats in a small government department can assess against all of human knowledge for whether an idea is original or not. Only a scientist working a life time in a very narrow area can do that and even then they make mistakes.

---

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Re:Everything is obvious

[dbIII]

You're saying that rewriting urls in a web page to fetch objects from geographically different servers was obvious in late 1998

No, I don't think that is what is being said. It was obvious to some people in 1992.

Re:Everything is obvious

[Gr8Apes]

Well, since HTML, circa 1993, was designed to allow for referencing external components. Rewriting URLs was a fundamental principal for serving pages and applications, which existed since at least 1996 that I'm aware of, as I did it then. Add in to that that commercial IP blocks are owned by companies with definite locality, and I'm not sure what part of Akamai's patent isn't stating things that were already in existence.

It was already stated that algorithms cannot be patented. And that's all that Akamai seems to have. Not withstanding that there's several thousand people skilled in the arts that would have come up with the same or similar solutions to the problem set.

Re:Everything is obvious

[TheRaven64]

I did some web design for a company around 93-94 (I can't remember exactly when, Netscape 2 was either new and shiny, or just about to be new and shiny, and most people used Mosaic). Because they wanted to be able to modify the page easily, they wanted to host it locally. Since they only had an ISDN line, I put their images on the web space provided by the ISP (slow to update, but lots of capacity) and the HTML on their computer. More recently, but well before 1998, I helped my school IT department set the proxy headers on their site to allow proxies to cache the images for much longer than the rest of the page. Neither of these was particularly new and exciting when I did it, it was just what people did to overcome obvious problems.

There are two parts to a non-obvious invention. Either it has to be a solution to a problem that is not obviously a problem, or it has to be a solution to a (potentially obvious) problem that isn't something anyone would think of. The problem that HTML pages change a lot and big binaries don't but take a lot of bandwidth is an obvious problem. The solution of caching the binary bits near the client is an obvious solution.

Re:Everything is obvious

[QuantumG]

Actually, around 1998, a DNS server that returned a different IP address for a lookup based on who the request is for was not only novel, it was considered WRONG. Geographical load balancing was your typical dot-com boom idea.

plus the address rewriting rules in popular servers like Apache. Evidence that you didn't even read the patent.. and you have the audacity to call the PTO incompetent. Not saying they're not, just saying that you shouldn't be throwing stones here.

Re:Everything is obvious

[QuantumG]

And none of those things you just described is what the patent is about. Go and read the patent already.

Re:Everything is obvious

[QuantumG]

Yeah, couldn't agree more. Makes ya wonder if Eli Whitney had to put up with his contemporaries saying "brushing cotton?! Pah, that's so obvious. I have my slaves do that all the time.. this is such an obvious patent."

Re:Everything is obvious

[Iphtashu Fitz]

A guy hosting images would find others not only presenting those images in a different website, but to add insult to injury, would load those images from _his_ servers? (i.e. they had modified their IMG tags to load images from the unwitting originator.) Now, if the originating servers were clustered and/or geographically distributed, you've got a setup just like Akamai.

Not really. What you describe is basically just offloading static images to an unsuspecting third party. If it's a popular website then that third part webserver will just choke under the load, causing problems for all the people visiting the original site. Akamai uses DNS tricks and other slight of hand to dynamically ensure images & other content are downloaded from servers physically close to you. So even if you and I visit the same website the images I receive will be downloaded from one server (close to me) and the images you receive will be from a different server (close to you). Those servers use some pretty sophisticated caching & content sharing algorithms to ensure the content is available when needed. It's the combination of DNS tricks & caching that is what makes Akamai work, and it's the algorithms involved in all that trickery that they're protecting. Take a look at my post here for a bit more detail.

Re:Everything is obvious

[Sinbios]

You can't, because you didn't file a patent for it!

Re:Everything is obvious

[pclminion]

It may not be obvious to a non-technical judge or jury, however, even today.

Which is really the core of the whole issue, isn't it? Obvious TO WHOM? Under patent law, that "whom" is "a person skilled in the art." In other words, a techie. Now, a lot of techies are vile, petty, competitive creatures with a great disdain for humanity as a whole. For reference, see Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org/). Of course we are going to find numerous tech professionals who will claim that any damn thing under the Sun is "obvious" just because of ego.

The root of the patent issue is in determining who, out of the millions employed in the tech sector, qualifies as a person "skilled in the art." Everybody thinks they are skilled. Few actually are. But there is a great social incentive to pretend that one is skilled, even if one is not, that surpasses such tendencies in almost any other field except the hard sciences. Nobody that I know of is ashamed of being only a "mediocre" car mechanic, for instance. Most people understand that the majority of individuals are "average." Except, of course, in the tech field, where we all believe ourselves to be geniuses.

Re:Everything is obvious

[ehrichweiss]

"Actually, around 1998, a DNS server that returned a different IP address for a lookup based on who the request is for was not only novel, it was considered WRONG."

Yet nothing about that makes the patent non-obvious to someone in the field, which is how the USPTO is supposed to rate obviousness, not whether the RFC happened to concur with the idea. I specifically remembering thinking that the patent was so bloody obvious that I couldn't believe it had been granted in the first place.

Re:Everything is obvious

[AusIV]

Yes, but did you suck the content from the site nearest the requesting user? This patent doesn't cover pulling content from somewhere other than the server that offered the HTML document, it covers algorithms that determine which server is best able to provide content to a particular user.

Re:Everything is obvious

[bit01]

Actually, around 1998, a DNS server that returned a different IP address for a lookup based on who the request is for was not only novel, it was considered WRONG.

It's just caching at a different network layer. Big deal.

Geographical load balancing was your typical dot-com boom idea.

No it was not. "Geographical load balancing" is just an obfuscated name for "caching", something that had been known about for decades. One of the big problems with the PTO is that they are endlessly confusing invented terminology with inventions. Not surprising the shifting sands of semantics their entire operation is based, on made worse by the amorphousness of software: What is *significantly* different? what is *significantly* innovative? When is a blob of software different? It's all hand waving.

plus the address rewriting rules in popular servers like Apache.

Evidence that you didn't even read the patent..

I read all the claims, which you said yourself is the meat. What evidence? I was referring to the fact that URL rewriting in general was well understood.

and you have the audacity to call the PTO incompetent.

Not a problem given their consistent track record, particularly in software.

Not saying they're not, just saying that you shouldn't be throwing stones here.

Whatever. I, like most people, do not have the time to wade through all the verbiage generated by all the fruitcakes on the planet. Yet another problem with the PTO; the idea that it's reasonable to do a detailed review of thousands of patents to check for infringement every time you try to do something creative.

---

A neurotic is the man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent. - Jerome Lawrence

Re:Everything is obvious

[Alomex]

I was doing web caching at the time (I had my hands very early on on the original hotspots paper by Akamai's founders). When I learned of the embedded elements redirection I found the Akamai idea totally non-obvious and far more reaching in terms of web caching than their hotspots contribution. Of course, once I saw it, all I could say was "what didn't I think of that, its so obvious!"

Re:Everything is obvious

[russotto]

There may be all sorts of trickery involved in what makes Akamai work, but the patent covers more than that trickery. It covers any system where a webserver modifies a URL to include a hostname whose DNS entry is served up by two DNS servers in the system, and whose content is served up by a host other than the webserver.

For examle, if I have a webserver at example.com, and it modifies image URLs within it to point to foo.bar.example.com, and there's an 'example.com' DNS server which contains the NS record for 'bar.example.com', and a 'bar.example.com' which has an A record pointing 'foo.bar.example.com' to some machine other than example.com, I've infringed claim 1 of the patent. If there are two nameservers for example.com, I've also infringed claim 2. If there are two nameservers for bar.example.com, I've infringed claim 3.

Re:Everything is obvious

[tuomoks]

Yes, very obvious. Drop modifying URL ( or any other mechanism to identify ) - it has been obvious a long, long time. Drop modifying DNS ( or any other mechanism to identify source and/or origin ) - obvious a long, long time ago. And so on. Does anyone remember when ordering cars or car parts using a computer in 80's. Let's see - at least Toyota did that, I think Nissan and Volvo maybe at the same time. The requests got distributed depending of system, network and locality to a link to Japan, the country main location and if they had a local dealership with a system there also. So, this kind of processing is nothing new. Actually airlines used similar processing in a world wide network in 70's already. It wasn't for public but the mechanism was much the same except the systems were much more complicated because of the logistics. That the service is now offered by an external company should not be worth of a patent - they can copyright their code but patenting methods / algorithms? Weird because if we let acronym (URL, DNS, IP, SDLC, etc) usage and manipulation be patented it will be a wild west again.

Re:Everything is obvious

[WNight]

Yeah, it's more than just links to an outside server, it's links to an outside server that's close to you and has the data.

But, that's pretty damn obvious. Round-robin DNS for load-balancing is an old and obvious technology. Instead of spreading the load in strict order, or by load average, you'd instead uses a lookup table of IPs to physical locations.

And that's pretty trivial. I've seen MUDs in the 80s that knew where you were connecting from.

Caching is "hard", in that hairy issues exist, but simple enough to do what you describe. If a request isn't cached, tell the server to do so, ideally while it keeps the initial connection open to serve what the upstream request returns. Preemptively cache related content.

Sure, there are improvements over those basic strategies. Stick a bunch of smart people in a room and they'll come up with stuff all day. But the basics were all there years ago and none of this is really far out.

Do we really need to patent this? Are the people at Akamai so pathetic that without the government enforcing a monopoly, as in being willing to use force to shut down their competitors, that they don't stand a chance? If so, how pathetic. If not, then what the hell do they need a government granted monopoly for? Nothing, just that their competitors all have equally stupid patents and it would be discrimination not to allow Akamai after letting everyone else...

Re:Everything is obvious

[WNight]

Perhaps because 'we', presumably uber-logical geeks, are smarter than everyone else. Maybe not by touchy-feely standards of IQ, but by the metric of being able to better parse complex statements, or design complex systems, yes.

As to smarter than other techs? Well, there are many people who assume that because they didn't know how to do something it must be black magic. There are others who know, from experience, that there is little you can't do well with a well-intentioned group of smart developers. (Polish to release, get in under budget, those are hard, but actually accomplishing the specific bit of tech, usually fairly easy.)

The problem is that 'obvious to whom' is the wrong question. We need to say, given similar funding and goals, would other teams be likely to discover this. In other words, if you advertised and did a talent search, would anyone be able to figure it out.

I guess that most thing which aren't obvious are that way merely because nobody asked those questions. At that point, we're giving business-model patents instead of tech patents, because the tech is often trivial (one-click) but Amazon's idea did speed up e-commerce. It's kind of like the Oscar's, they miss rewarding a good movie one year so they give the director his 'just rewards' a year later, for a crappier movie.

Re:Everything is obvious

[Cramer]

You're missing the all-important DNS Voodoo of the Akamai system. When a user in ISP A's network looks up the host of your image tag, Akamai will return an IP within ISP A's network because they have a local Akamai cache server. Similarly, a user in ISP B's network will be directed to ISP B's local Akamai cache. For users in ISP C's network, who doesn't have a local cache, Akamai will return a cache server close to ISP C -- where "close" depends on network topology.

Everyone who hit your setup retreived the images from the same location.

Re:Everything is obvious

[rastoboy29]

Are you seriously suggesting that the patent is worthy?  Gimme a break, it's merely a relatively minor efficiency tweak--anybody would have thought of the same thing when faced with the same problem.

Re:Everything is obvious

[WNight]

Cotton brushing was pretty obvious to him, so he made a machine to do it. The mechanism of the machine was patented, not the brushing.

In Akamai's case, there is so little mechanism that they're essentially patenting standard sysadmin tools. Round-robin DNS is an old concept, it usually distributes fairly, or on workload. The only difference in Akamai's case is that it's geographical, and that's just an easy lookup.

Re:Everything is obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the fucking patent before posting you greasy freak.

Re:Everything is obvious

[sonamchauhan]

> describe is basically just offloading static images to an unsuspecting third party.

What if the 'unsuspecting third party' was a geographically distributed server setup like CPAN or sourceforge.net?

Nefarious intent does not invalidate prior art.

I have no hassles with Akamai protecting something innovative, say their precise server-determination algorithms, but geographically distributed HTTP load balancing itself is not worth protecting.

Re:Everything is obvious

[Alain Williams]

No you can't ... but if, years ago, you wrote up what you were doing, ie ''published the idea'' then what you were doing could help to destroy this patent on the grounds of prior art. This would not just help Limelight but would stop Akamai coming after you and stopping you from continuing to do something that you have done from before they filed their patent.

This should be a lesson to us all. If you do something that might be novel - publish, like that you stop someone from patenting the idea and stopping you from doing something that you invented. Yes: you might not be the first to 'invent' it, many people can have the same idea, you will probably never know who invited it first.

Publishing something is cheap; if we all do this we can help in mutual protection against patents.

Re:Everything is obvious

[rasilon]

People are perfectly capable of evaluating whether something is obvious or not after the fact. They don't mystically lose their intelligence simply because they have more facts at their disposal.

The facts beg to differ. Research in to negligence cases shows that people are far more likely to rate something as obvious when they've seen the outcome.

I can't remember who defined genius as "The ability to see the obvious things that others miss.", but it's sometimes useful to remember.

Re:Everything is obvious

[Iphtashu Fitz]

What if the 'unsuspecting third party' was a geographically distributed server setup like CPAN or sourceforge.net?

CPAN, SourceForge, etc. don't use DNS load balancing like Akamai does. They just use a collection of static mirrors and they randomly pick one or let you pick from a list. Now if you could just type in "download.sourceforge.net" and have it return a download location logically close to you that would be a different situation. But how would you implement this? If there were hundreds of download mirrors around the world, a random subset of which is actually operational at any given time, how would you set up a DNS server to accurately return the IP of the closest mirror to you in roughly the same amount of time as a typical static DNS lookup? That's what makes Akamai's environment unique, is the ability to do this all in real-time, with a dynamic pool of available mirrors to choose from, as well as other rules since some ISP's, etc. only want Akamai to use their local mirrors for their own customers (so that those ISP's dont incur additional network charges by serving to people other than their customers).

Re:Everything is obvious

[ajs]

In Akamai's case, there is so little mechanism that they're essentially patenting standard sysadmin tools. Round-robin DNS is an old concept, it usually distributes fairly, or on workload. The only difference in Akamai's case is that it's geographical, and that's just an easy lookup. I think it's worse than that.

I'm pretty sure that the patents on returning DNS answers based on geography are held by Cisco. Akamai is only claiming the higher level content-management-by-location concept.

I'll admit that, without hindsight, some of this idea is clearly novel. However, the core problem with software patents has never been the novelty or lack of (sometimes there is a lack of novelty, but not always). The core problem is two-fold: 1) software patents are fundamentally math patents, and math is not "invented" and 2) the duration that's reasonable in non-software is crippling to the rapid-turnaround software world where develop-package-and-release cycles are 6 months and many products are obsolete within a year or two.

If software patents were only issued for 2 years with the availability of 2 extensions for a hefty fee (i.e. only those patents that were commercially successful would be renewed) and only whole, working systems, and not their algorithms were patentable, then I'd be fine with them.

Re:Everything is obvious

[bit01]

The facts beg to differ.

Wrong.

Research in to negligence cases shows that people are far more likely to rate something as obvious when they've seen the outcome.

All this demonstrates is that when people have more facts at their disposal they make a different, more informed decision. This is a surprise?

And why are you automatically assuming that the decision where they haven't seen the outcome is the correct one?

I can't remember who defined genius as "The ability to see the obvious things that others miss.", but it's sometimes useful to remember.

And also irrelevant. Genius involves finding simple solutions to complex problems. People are perfectly capable of distinguishing simple solutions from obvious ones. The phrase "that's pure genius" springs to mind.

---

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

Google has used Akamai's network

[hostguy2004]

Actually, Google has used Akamai technology and services. Google.com DNS was hosted by Akamai, and some of their other services use Akamai for content delivery such as YouTube. As Google has grown, they have become less reliant on Akamai.

Non-obviousness

[Prime Mover]

Just did a report about business patents. Non-obviousness, a requirement of Patents (35 USC 102?), isn't proven by looking at something and saying "Duh!" You need to show prior art preferably enough prior art examples to cover all of Akamai's claims.

Re:Non-obviousness

[DustyShadow]

You need to show prior art preferably enough prior art examples to cover all of Akamai's claims. Actually each claim is required to be nonobvious by itself. You can invalidate single claims by showing prior art for them. And nonobviousness is 35 U.S.C. 103.

Re:Non-obviousness

[pclminion]

Just did a report about business patents. Non-obviousness, a requirement of Patents (35 USC 102?), isn't proven by looking at something and saying "Duh!" You need to show prior art preferably enough prior art examples to cover all of Akamai's claims.

I'm not sure that I understand you properly. You are saying that if you can find prior art, this proves obviousness. In other words, the fact that somebody thought of it, makes it obvious, i.e., all things are obvious. Since this is clearly not what you mean, could you please clarify?

Re:Non-obviousness

[frankenheinz]

I think you confuse the [independent] requirements of non-obviousness (35USC103) and novelty (35USC102).

Re:Non-obviousness

[glwtta]

Non-obviousness, a requirement of Patents (35 USC 102?), isn't proven by looking at something and saying "Duh!" You need to show prior art

So, the first person to do something obvious gets a patent on it?

Apparently the patent system is working as intended, after all.

Re:Non-obviousness

[DustyShadow]

The prior art has to be dated at least one year prior to the "priority date" which in most cases is the application filing date.

Re:Non-obviousness

[pclminion]

But had that prior art been patented, then it would not have been considered obvious. So we have a situation where obviousness is determined by the filing of arbitrary paperwork, which makes no sense.

Technological ignorance in the legal profession

[gilesjuk]

I think this case proves it. They're simply not aware of the technical implementations of popular sites out there, leading to these sort of stupid cases.

Many advertisers will fall fowl of this, since many sites have ad content that is served up by another server which is not their own.

Re:Technological ignorance in the legal profession

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Ad sites might not fall into this. Akamai is protecting an entire system that involves the dynamic distribution of cached static content through it's servers around the world and the use of DNS tricks to ensure that any user who needs that content gets it from the server closest to him/her. It's much more than just displaying images from another server. The only way an advertiser would run into problems is if they developed their own in-house dynamic caching system for the delivery of their ads. I think most advertisers use a handful of static servers for content delivery unless they rely on CDN companies like Akamai or LimeLight.

Re:Technological ignorance in the legal profession

[Daimanta]

And guess what, you can't expect them to. I do not expect them to understand the inner workings of the internet or the www ot html. You can't ask me to have basic knowledge of particle physics or advanced chemistry. It doesn't matter if I am a judge or not. If that was the case, the requirements to be a judge would be ridicilously high. So high, that no normal person could do it. I expect judges to know their way when it comes to the law and common knowledge things(geography, calculations etc.). For the rest I consider impartial(so no "experts" for hire) experts neccesairy.

Re:So they can sue the Internet????

[palegray.net]

So now every website in the woruld is infringing a stupid patent from a patent trool? You know, your (presumed) spelling error reminds us all to watch out for astroturfing Akamai employees in discussions on this topic. See the definition of Trool on the Urban Dictionary site.

Re:Non-obviousness - mod parent up

[Titoxd]

Damn, and I just used my mod points... people need to start realizing that the best way to argue against a patent is not by saying "but so-and-so did this", but to tell the USPTO (or find somebody who will tell them) that "so-and-so did this"...

The Law's failing us.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, at the very least, the lawmakers and law-interpreters are. Am I the only one who thinks it's time to start taking it into our own hands?

And no, I'm not talking about some juvenile prank involving a web site.

Hm

[daeg]

So JavaScript-based RSS feeds violate the patent, correct? The HTML is served from one or more possibly distributed servers while the owner of the RSS feed has control of the RSS feed's content.

Re:Hm

[daeg]

I didn't say their patent wasn't valid, I was just asking a valid question considering I know of a few sites that use them.

Only parts are very obvious

[EmbeddedJanitor]

I am also not a lawyer, but I have written over ten patents and read many.

As in many of these "obvious patent" trolling articles, the article/summary oversimplify the patent. The patent does not just claim click here, fetch there redirection which is used by just about every major site, but algorithms for doing the load balancing etc.

If you read some of the claims, then you'll see that various algorithms are used for load balancing and other purposes. While these might be obvious to some, they are extremely obvious to all.

The test of "obvious" is also not that clear cut. IIRC, the tests is "reasonably obvious to practitioners of the art". This test should be applied to the state of the art as at the time of the patent, because a patent "teaches" the industry and therefore after the disclosure the less-than-obvious become obvious.

Re:So they can sue the Internet????

[Iphtashu Fitz]

What Akamai does is run a global network of servers that serve as a smart cache for the content of their customers data. E*Trade, for example, is a customer of theirs. When you go to www.etrade.com you get the static HTML document from the E*Trade server but the static images are downloaded from an Akamai caching server that's located physically close to you (meaning fewer network hops to you than the actual E*Trade server). By pulling images and other static content from servers physically close to you it not only speeds up your use of their website but it offloads a lot of work from the main E*Trade servers and lowers their network utilization. So the "global hosting system" they refer to is this custom distributed cache that they run on servers located all over the world. I posted a bit more detail about how Akamais network works in this reply.

They are talking about Edge Side Includes

[daBass]

I would assume they are talking about Edge Side Includes and not simply about the serving of images.

ESI is like Server Side Includes, except that the included part resides on the Edge servers. So your server would serve a page with only the content personalized to you specifically (like the fact that you are logged in) but a box full of news headlines that everyone sees would be included by the edge server.

Not entirely obvious, but I am not so sure it warrants patent protection in any case.

Re:They are talking about Edge Side Includes

[Antique Geekmeister]

I don't think so. Akamai's servers don't store the client's content statically, there's much, much, much too much content for that, especially for streaming media. It would be hideously expensive in disk space for their servers. Instead, they use a web proxy to rewrite the URL's, grab the content from their customer's designated servers, and keep it cached locally on that Akamai server or set of servers as it's needed. So the first hit on an image takes a while to grab from the customer, but the rest go against Akamai's servers at much higher speed and with a much better fan-out to support lots of customers.

It's basically a fanned out form of web proxy, with some fascinating DNS architecture to get you the nearest Akamai proxy. As such, it's well worth some patents: I remember when the company was created, and thinking "wow, I wish I'd thought of that!" It does leave me curious, as well, about what their core tools are? Squid and djbdns, maybe? Does anyone know?

Re:They are talking about Edge Side Includes

[daBass]

Who said anything about static? :)

But read the link I pointed to about ESI. Akamai does more than just server dependencies like images, video, css, js, etc. They actually have an engine that assembles HTML also.

That said, I don't think any more this is specifically about ESI; the patent doesn't really mention it. It just seems to cover the good old image includes.

No matter, back when this was patented, this was far from obvious and certainly a novel idea. I am not the biggest fan of software patents, but I'd say they are far from patent trolls; they have an actual application they are trying to make money off.

Re:They are talking about Edge Side Includes

[Antique Geekmeister]

That ESI link looks like what I read about 5 years ago when discussing Akamai with someone who thought having a Squid server in their local network would do the same thing and we decided that no, there are big differences.

I agree that a lot of this was far from obvious when the patent was made. And I agree that this is not a patent troll issue: they actually use the patent, and the patents they've filed seem surprisingly legible. It's not like Microsoft's "57 patent violations by Linux" that they refuse to actually list or reveal.

For the small religious subset of Slashdotters...

[DoofusOfDeath]

it's time to pray for that upcoming Supreme Court decision that will cover the scope of what's patentable.

Re:Non-obviousness - mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

but to tell the USPTO (or find somebody who will tell them) that "so-and-so did this"...

Unfortunately, challenging the patent at the USPTO isn't free.

Akamai win a dilemma for Microsoft?

[1sockchuck]

Microsoft is partnering with Limelight to build its own CDN network. They're probably the biggest of Limelight's 1,150 customers, but there are plenty of other big companies using Limelight. If the judge issues an injunction, they might have tough decisions, as Limelight has said an injunction might force them to shut down their CDN. Appeals would stretch things out, but customers don't like uncertainty.

Re:Akamai win a dilemma for Microsoft?

[simong]

That's quite interesting, as Microsoft used to have their own caching server system. Apple are a major client of Akamai. Hmmm...

What a ridiculous summary

[the eric conspiracy]

In at least two fundamental ways. First, the summary quoted the abstract of the patent, not the claims. The abstract is almost always a simplified extract of the contents of the patent and rarely has any meat to it. Of course it looks obvious.

READ THE CLAIMS TO FIND OUT WHAT IS BEING COVERED BY THE PATENT!!

Here is claim 1:

1. A distributed hosting framework operative in a computer network in which users of client machines connect to a content provider server, the framework comprising:

a routine for modifying at least one embedded object URL of a web page to include a hostname pretended to a domain name and path;

a set of content servers, distinct from the content provider server, for hosting at least some of the embedded objects of web pages that are normally hosted by the content provider server;

at least one first level name server that provides a first level domain name service (DNS) resolution; and

at least one second level name server that provides a second level domain name service (DNS) resolution;

wherein in response to requests for the web page, generated by the client machines the web page including the modified embedded object URL is served from the content provider server and the embedded object identified by the modified embedded object URL is served from a given one of the content servers as identified by the first level and second level name servers.

Doesn't seem so obvious now, does it?

The second is the fact is that Akamai is a very innovative company that has pioneered a lot of distributed content delivery starting with the early days of the internet. In my mind it is very obvious that they would have a lot of valid patent material. They are most assuredly NOT patent trolls, and in fact have brought many innovations based on some very advanced work to commercial fruition. It is insane that their work is being shown in this light by Slashdot.

The company was founded by an MIT graduate student (Dan Lewin) and an applied math professor from MIT, Tom Leighton who is currently head of the algorithms group at at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Lewin was tragically killed when AA flight 11 was crashed during the 9-11 terrorist attack.

This article is one of the most ridiculous ever posted by Slashdot.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Rakishi]

Doesn't seem so obvious now, does it? Actually it does, just because they use many large words doesn't make what you quote anything but obvious. Christ, I mean the patent has 34 sections and you quote one of the most obvious of them.

You know what your quote says: "serve some of the parts of a webpage from other servers." In other words if you allow an easy way of hot linking of images then you meet the criteria.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't seem so obvious now, does it?

Yes it fucking does, if you strip the patentese. Fuck you. And fuck Akamai. And fuck the USPTO and any yank fucks who support it.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Alomex]

It is interesting to see the Dr. Watsons of slashdot criticizing the MIT Sherlocks for the obviousness of their inventions. Akamai's redirection trick was an "aha!" moment that was missed by all the early literature on web caching ([sarcasm] literature you surely are throughly familiar with, Dr Watson? [/sarcasm]).

Ten years later, what was an insightful trick is the technique de rigeur. Think packet switched networ for something that is now obvious but at the time was so revolutionary that it got its creators a Turing Award.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Wolfbone]

In at least two fundamental ways. First, the summary quoted the abstract of the patent, not the claims. The abstract is almost always a simplified extract of the contents of the patent and rarely has any meat to it. Of course it looks obvious.

READ THE CLAIMS TO FIND OUT WHAT IS BEING COVERED BY THE PATENT!! I did. Where in claim 1 is the non-obvious meat you speak of that is not in the abstract?

Doesn't seem so obvious now, does it? Why not?

The second is the fact is that Akamai is a very innovative company that has pioneered a lot of distributed content delivery... It is insane that their work is being shown in this light by Slashdot. It is insane if that invention is Akamai's idea of a contribution to progress and disclosure thereof meriting a 20 year monopoly right to exclude.

This article is one of the most ridiculous ever posted by Slashdot. Not really. The frequency with which articles are posted about hapless re-inventors getting caught out by dreadful patents like this one is rather tedious though.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[glwtta]

Doesn't seem so obvious now, does it?

All I'm seeing is the same thing as the summary, just with more words.

If you think this is the sort of thing that needs patent protection, you are high; no matter how many "wherein"'s they throw in there.

I'm sure they are in fact a very innovative company, that doesn't stop this patent from being complete bullshit.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Rakishi]

It's even more interesting to watch the Netherlanders of Slashdot try to defend Mr. Holmes, I mean it's actually beyond hilarious just how much of an idiot you apparently are. Christ, you can't even comprehend the couple sentences in my original post much less the patent itself. You quote the most obvious part of the patent that is used by nearly any website and the one part which has NOTHING to do with web caching. It's an overall basic descriptive section pure and simple, meant to be nothing but that and contains none of the guts of the patent. It's like quoting the definitions section of a math thesis and saying they're incredibly insightful. Only an utter nitwit would even consider that instead of quoting the guts of a thesis or the overall contributions of it.

I never said the patent is (or isn't) obvious, I simply said you're a moron who couldn't defend it's lack of obviousness if your life depended on it. Judging by some of the other replies to your post this seems to be not only my own opinion.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Gideon Fubar]

Loyalty a good argument does not make.

The patent is actually kinda obvious, actually actually. Whether it was obvious in 1999 when it was registered is another matter, but distributed content serving is certainly quite obvious now. Also, whether or not they're an innovative company is irrelevant if they're suing another company for infringing on their (obvious or not) patent specifically to stop them competing. That's the very definition of anti-competitive behavior, even if it's legally allowed.

please note: despite the fact that Akamai's services tend to keep them off the radar for most people (even as they serve them content) most of the slashdot community are likely to be familiar with them, their services, etc.. Also, the fact that their co-founder died in a plane crash on 9/11 has very little to do with this argument, as sad as it may be.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll spell it out for you:

No one before Akamai was doing this: "a routine for modifying at least one embedded object URL of a web page to include a hostname pretended to a domain name and path".

Now you call that obvious after the fact and without any knowledge of the subject, which just proves the point that you are a johnny-come-lately with a talent for using swear words but little else.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Rakishi]

Yet that phrase has nothing to do with web caching, is simply doing that what they patented according to you? I'd be surprised if that method wasn't already used for logging outgoing links by that time and it's unlikely that that itself is an innovation of theirs.

It may or may not be innovative in terms of web caching however in that case their patent doesn't seem to be of much practical use. In fact since if you regard THAT as their chief innovation you must have a very low opinion of their ingenuity.

See it's easy enough to simply modify the url instead of pretending text to it, in fact that seems to be done more often than not with such services nowadays (see myspace for example which uses x.myspace.com). On the other hand if you say that modifying the url does in fact count then you're simply agreeing with the original slashdot summaries description of the patent.

There are ways to argue why this is innovative, the original poster is just too inept to use them apparently.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Rakishi]

Also why are all you too inept to comprehend, even after I say so explicitly, that I am saying nothing about the patent itself (ie: how obvious or non-obvious it is) simply your incompetency at defending it?

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be surprised if that method wasn't already used for logging outgoing links by that time and it's unlikely that that itself is an innovation of theirs.

You'd be "surprised", i.e. you don't know for sure. All you are doing is guessing which was the original point of my comment of ignoramus Dr. Watson's trying to outguess Sherlock's without full knowledge of the facts.

It may or may not be innovative in terms of web caching however in that case their patent doesn't seem to be of much practical use.

If it wasn't of any use then why exactly do you think the competitor was violating it?

The more you write the clearer it is that you know nothing about web caching, my dear Watson.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Anonymous Coward]

What a troll

No, matching just one and only one item of a patent does NOT mean you fall foul of it.
You have to match them all.

This is supposed to be a site for nerds, and you don't even understand basic binary logic that is & ???

Go to digg where you belong

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Quothz]

First, the summary quoted the abstract of the patent, not the claims.

Does, too.

The second is the fact is that Akamai is a very innovative company that has pioneered a lot of distributed content delivery starting with the early days of the internet.

1998 was hardly the early days of the Internet. Or even the Web, really, although that's debatable enough.

Lewin was tragically killed when AA flight 11 was crashed during the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I'm not sure what Lewin's death has t'do with patent rights. Are they claiming rights on that manner of death? I'm confused.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Rakishi]

You'd be "surprised", i.e. you don't know for sure. Yet I'm right and you're not, so apparently you didn't know. I on the other hand know I'm clever and usually right but don't claim to unless I'm sure, such as right now. United States Patent 5752022 filed in 1995 by IBM which mentions URL prepending in a distributed network.

A simple search of the patent database will probably find hundreds of similar patents and many are probably earlier, I'm sure the original prior art can be traced to the beginnings of the URL scheme. It's obvious, only a zealot would think otherwise.

All you are doing is guessing which was the original point of my comment of ignoramus Dr. Watson's trying to outguess Sherlock's without full knowledge of the facts. No I'm applying logic and reason to the problem based on my own knowledge of the subject, of course I can't claim to be certain so I don't.

And once again I never claimed to know if the patent was obvious or not. You on the other hand do as do other people in this thread, apparently with even less knowledge of the subject. False belief in one's own lack of ignorance does not make someone any less ignorant.

If it wasn't of any use then why exactly do you think the competitor was violating it? They weren't, they were violating all the other actually important parts of the patent. Just because you're too stupid to see them doesn't mean they don't exist.

Sigh, christ your reading comprehension is worse than a rocks. I said IF the sentence you quoted was the MAIN or even REQUIRED part of the patent then the patent is worthless. Of course it obviously is not the main or even a necessary part of the patent, as the patent has a lot more to it.

The more you write the clearer it is that you know nothing about web caching, my dear Watson. Neither do you it seems my dear monkey, not do you know nothing about the English language and can't read it seems. I at least never claimed to know things I don't.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[Rakishi]

That's my point, the quoted section does jack shit to describe the parts of the patent that matter. I could argue how hot linking on a large scale violates this patent but that'd of course be absurd.

The DNS aspect of this patent and how it's used is key from what I understand of a quick look at prior court cases, the rest of it is in many ways fluff (prior art and so on I think).

If you're going to argue something is non-obvious then at least know the bloody subject and how it's actually BEEN argued to be non-obvious.

Re:What a ridiculous summary

[friendorfoe]

Actually, you just proved the whole obviousness point. The Federal Circuit Court, which sits in DC and hears all appeals of patent cases, ruled in 2003 in the Akamai v. Digital Island appeal that Claim 1 was obvious and they invalidated that claim and some others. Akamai has tried to hide this from people for years.

So much for Akamai's b.s. about how they invented the Internet, huh?

Re:Non-obviousness - mod parent up

[Titoxd]

That's why you funnel resources to organizations that are already doing this, like the EFF's Patent Busting project, which I linked above. Economies of scale and all that.

Trouble for other players?

[geek_mystic]

While I haven't been following the litigation very closely, Limelight's position on it seems interesting. They seem to be denying that they infringed upon the patent, rather than taking the approach that the patent is obvious or that there exists prior art. I'm sure there is a sound legal strategy here, I'm not a lawyer - but my instinct would be to go the other way (maybe that's why I'm not a lawyer, ha!)

It'll also be very interesting to see how the other well-funded CDN players react to this - Level 3 (which is also suing Limelight over patents), EdgeCast (Disney-funded) and Internap (with about the same market cap as Limelight.)

The way I read the patent, they must all be infringing in some way, no?

Akamai Made Microsoft Run on Linux

[miller60]

Microsoft's use of Akamai in 2003 gained attention when it made it appear that Microsoft's web site was running on Linux. In actuality it was just the Akamai caching servers using Linux. Like Google, they've since shifted to using more of their own network as well as Limelight and Savvis (now Level 3).

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN - GOATSE LINK!

[Anonymous Coward]

then again.. maybe he's right, maybe you aren't old enough.

So they've patented

[n6kuy]

... automatic redirection to the "nearest" mirror?

Brilliant!
What a novel use of technology.

Surely this is just amazing. Who ever woulda thunk that computers could do things for us automatically?

Re:So they've patented

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd have a point if computers wrote the algorithm that did it, or if that algorithm could have been written by a college freshman over spring break.

but they didn't and they couldn't.

It's obvious in the same sense that aspirin is "obviously" a good choice for mild pain. This just in! Chemicals can do things! But we both know aspirin was considerably more complicated than that.

Re:So they've patented

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obvious in the same sense that wood is "obviously" a good choice for building houses.

fixed that for you.

Re:So they've patented

[pestilence669]

They wouldn't have won their case unless it was a novel use. :) The courts are always right and justice prevails in all instances. Those who mistrust Lady Liberty are anti-American.

You aren't anti-American, are you n6kuy?

Business Method Patents Suck.

[twitter]

I used to work at Akamai so I have a pretty good firsthand knowledge of how their stuff works. I doubt a lot of their algorithms they use would pass the "obviousness" test...

With all due respect to the cleverness of the algorithm, your employer and yourself, software patents suck. A general method was patented which means that no other algorithm can do the same thing, no matter how clever. That's why software and business method patents suck life - they claim methods not real inventions. Because no method is ever really an invention, neither is an algorithm which is just a formal statement of methods.

This lawsuit cost Limelight $45 million bucks and it will cost us all much more as a monopoly has been granted on one of the few practical ways to move media around the internet from a central site. There are countless services that use this kind of method to share load out to a pool of participating machines, preferably close to the user. Hopefully the bastards won't be able to get Debian's NTP pool of the DNS system. What's left for media distribution is Alkamai and the much demonized and harassed P2P networks. How shitty.

Re:Business Method Patents Suck.

[SirSlud]

That's pretty much it, isn't it? "You can generate electricity? Well, we patented electricity."

Re:Business Method Patents Suck.

[gr8scot]

Huh, my manager found an ad about a shipping service from a Web page, specifically the "HTML document portion of a Web page." He then looked up the nearest location in the phone book, and sent his lackey to send our product, ACME Crap, with that service instead of via the United States Postal Service, as we have been doing. I was in the nick of time to warn him that this business process is now patented, and his lackey has begun a random walk to the first Federal Express location it finds by blind chance. Back at headquarters, it has been decided that whichever location he uses we will designate "shipping1" and use for all shipping. However, other employees are allowed to tell us if they find other, closer franchises of the same global business, in which case the nearer location will be designated "shipping1" and all others will be sorted by distance. We plan to patent this algorithm, which we term "the second least-stupid way" and enough trivial variants on it that everybody else will have to pay us royalties, or walk aimlessly for all their business needs. We anticipate either that both business process patents and software patents will be discontinued and repealed shortly thereafter, or civilization will.

Re:Business Method Patents Suck.

[FredFredrickson]

I'm sorry, but I've already got that one patented. Your only hope is a map and darts*. 1 out of every 40304592 throws may be a shipping center. Unfortunately, I also patented the method "using a phonebook" and I have patents pending for other forms of getting information that may be helpful- so good luck to you.

*On second thought, map and darts seems like the way a good portion of businesses do business, so I'm snatching up that patent as well. Think of the royalties I'll collect!

By 1996 you could already BUY a system to do it...

[kriegsman]

Well, it was pretty obvious then, at least to people in the business, especially considering that at least one earlier CDN patent (e.g., US Pat. 5,991,809, originally filed as provisional pat. 60/022,598, filed on July 25, 1996 , by me) had already been granted and therefore made completely public in 1997. Clearway Technologies (my company) was already selling a commercial off-the-shelf CDN implementation system starting in September of 1996. Akamai's success has been substantial, and I feel it is truly well-deserved, but they were not the first to invent a CDN, nor the first to patent it, nor the first to bring it to commercialize it.

-Mark Kriegsman
Founder, Clearway Technologies

What is actually being patented

[sholsinger]

... is the service of providing a network with which to do what the parent is suggesting. Additionally they provide geo-location-specific servers that enable faster connections to said content.

If you have static content that infrequently changes this is the best way to distribute that type of content. However, usually it tends to be really large, or frequently requested static content. Although, this can actually decrease perceived performance and speed from the users' perspective because their web browser now needs to request objects from another server. And depending on Akamai's system possibly multiple geographically close servers. This type of situation tends to take longer to download things like images because the client machine needs to query the IP address for yet another server. And then of course actually initalize a connection to that machine, which it has already completed with the initial server to download the HTML document.

Yahoo! has been offering this type of service for a long time. (since Geocities) yimg.com is the top-level domain for all of their image hosting servers. Which are spread out across the world. Images are given a unique id and then requested, IPs being resolved in a similar manner to what Akamai does. It is my opinion that they may hold the oldest prior art in this situation.

In other news...

[tubapro12]

...googling for Akamai generates a 403 and CAPTCHA to regain permissions.

Re:For the small religious subset of Slashdotters.

[ADRA]

The supreme court can only interpret laws, they can't create them. Try picking up the phone and calling your local congressman/woman.

Akamai == Squid

[skander]

Squid, the http caching program, was conceived long before Akamai became a company.

All the services that Akamai propose can be achieved with localized Squid servers. Akamai's only benefit is it's market share, which allows it to provide it's (Squid) services at a lower cost.

These patents have no ground, as the technology was already invented by Squid programmers over a decade ago.

Thank God these US patents are not enforced in the EU.

http://www.squid-cache.org/

Live Patent Free! Contact your Govt representatives to abolish Patent Laws!

Re:Akamai == Squid

[Antique Geekmeister]

Is Akamai actually using Squid? Or another proxy program? Under the hood, it really is a proxying technology.

What rediculous melodrama

[SuperBanana]

Lewin was tragically killed when AA flight 11 was crashed during the 9-11 terrorist attack.

And if he had been hit by a bus, would that be less tragic? Jesus christ, I've heard "Nine eleven" invoked in some stupid ways, but this takes the cake.

Patent cure for cancer

[Dan541]

I was thinking I should patant the cure for cancer.

Wait, they patented the man-in-the-middle attack?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just amazing.

Someone must be busily reading history and fiction like mad, and finding a way to put everything everyone has ever done into fancy patent language.

Has anyone patented cat's whiskers for measuring widths for small mobile devices yet?

Six Years Of So Obvious, No One Thought Of It

[nick_davison]

The web, along with HTML, has been available since, what, '93?

They didn't file the patent until '99.

If it's that obvious, one would assume there's prior art from that six year window.

If it had been filed in say '95 when there wasn't that much interest in the web yet, that'd be one thing. By '99, a hell of a lot of people were using it and filing IPOs as fast as they could come up with ideas.

The alternative explanation would be that it wasn't all that obvious and the obviousness either comes from retrospect or misreading what the patent actually implies.

Just an observation but outrage, as often as not, comes from misunderstanding all of the details and circumstances. Sure, this is obvious and outrageous... from a short summary. Apparently it wasn't to those judging it with more information. It may be they were hoodwinked. Possibly more likely is there's more to it than a lay interpretation of a web summary.

Talk too much, know too little...

[PhrozenF]

Guys, I've been at Slashdot for years, and have never seen such blatant disregard for the core subject matter. You guys are all going on writing about how obvious the patent is / how bad akamai is, without even looking into the matter. I've been an Akamai customer for many years now, and no matter how much of a bloodsucking leech they are, and how exorbitantly they price their services, they do have some massive innovation going behind their products.

First, the patent isn't so obvious. The patent is for Edge Side Includes, which is in no way trivial. It is the method by which you can have a full HTML page (eg.the slashdot homepage), cached at the akamai edge servers, and have one part of personalized message (welcome USERNAME / you have X private messages / etc. etc.) load from the origin servers, taking into account all cookies etc. Doing so required inventing a whole new method of writing, interpreting, and selectively applying caching to enhanced include tags, that too across a distributed network, supporting other cool items like tiered distribution, progressive caching, server side cookies etc. etc.

Now, realize, this isn't about loading one object, like an image / flash object / javascript from a different server, but transparently loading a part of the core HTML code of a page from the origin server, with full support for cookies / post etc. while making it look like it is coming from the same physical source, so as to maintain cookie coherency. Trust me, before Akamai's founder came around and invented this, web caching static objects with personalized items was like pulling teeth. Also, Akamai is licensing this technology to the whole world http://www.akamai.com/html/support/esi.html, and if they choose not to license this to their competitors, but the competitor goes ahead and implements it "as-is" based on their spec, then hey, the competitor deserves to be sued.

And you know what? Limelight is a bunch of ex-akamai guys, who left with a boatload of trade secrets, and customer lists. I got a call from them within 15 days of their service starting, asking to switch over at half price, but their Super POP model doesn't work for dynamic content like ours.

Re:Talk too much, know too little...

[Tablizer]

Trust me, before Akamai's founder came around and invented this, web caching static objects with personalized [custom] items was like pulling teeth.

Aren't I-frames being used more often for this? Sure, they have limits, but can still do a lot.

Re:Talk too much, know too little...

[thehossman]

Akamai is licensing this technology to the whole world http://www.akamai.com/html/support/esi.html , and if they choose not to license this to their competitors, but the competitor goes ahead and implements it "as-is" based on their spec, then hey, the competitor deserves to be sued.

That almost makes sense, except that even according to the Akamai page you link to...

The ESI open-standard specification is being co-authored by Akamai, ATG, BEA Systems, Circadence, Digital Island, IBM, Interwoven, Oracle, and Vignette.

You can't claim something is an "open standard" and then sue people for building and using their own implementation. well, I guess aparently you can -- but be prepared for me (and clearly a lot of other people) to think you are being petty and stupid.

Nothing to see here

[Vexorian]

A company winning a lawsuit against a competitor since they have patented the objective of an algorithm rather than the algorithm itself, nothing new to see here, come back later.

Was doing this in 1998 - offshore gambling

[evought]

A company I contracted to was building an Internet gambling site (football spreads). Since the site was technically not legal in the US, the site was run off-shore (Hati and DR). The problem was that bandwidth (and latency) was not good to either country. So, we served the images for the site (perfectly legal) off a domestic server. Fast response time, but the actual site logic was safely out of jurisdiction.

The site was called "Wager Web", but I don't think it exists anymore. After the off-shore clients stopped paying, we repossessed the product and modified it to use fake money and prizes from vendors (for making the most "money" during a season). I don't know what happened after that as I started my own company around that time.

Genuity in 1997, "Hopscotch" protocol

[evought]

Genuity, a web hosting company, was doing this via their "hopscotch" routing protocol in 1997. They were bought by GTE at that point but the technology had already been in development for several years. I met the founders at a conference and we exchanged some ideas on improvements based on some work I was doing for another company. Basically, though, they had connections into all of the major NAPs in the US and a dynamic cost-based routing protocol that chose which server to use for which customer. Dynamic updates to the site data (e.g. actually buying stuff) was more complex, obviously, because they had to wait for the transaction to synchronize, but at least they benefited by processing the request through the fastest pipe to the browser. Those updates and associated content came from a different server, matching the patent requirements.

I found this article ( http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1997_Dec_10/ai_20053332 ) rather easily, going back to 1997.

So Obvious, people were already doing it

[evought]

As I note in a previous post, http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=472974&cid=22621278 , Genuity was doing dynamic cost-based routing and smart mirroring in 1997 and the technology had already been in development for several years. The company I was working with was also working on similar technology, which is how I got introduced to the founders of Genuity (about the time they were bought by GTE). I know of at least one other effort to do the same thing during the same period, although it was not as far along as either ours or Genuity's "Hopscotch" protocol, and another company I worked with was doing the same thing with distributed database systems in 1998 (project was over five years old when I worked with it).

We also had a Internet gambling site at the time which used at least elements of the patent in that it was an off-shore (for legal reasons) site with static content served domestically for performance through multiple NAP connections with some routing magic. No where near as advanced as either Genuity or the design we were working on, but obviously pointing toward that goal.

A guy, possibly by the name of Alex Yuriev, was talking about distributed sites and dynamic routing in Philadelphia in 1996-1997. He may have worked for NetAccess at that point and was a bit genius with BGP and routing in general. My business partner at the time talked back and forth with him about some of the similar things we were working on.

The base concept is just not that hard, and the most difficult part of the implementation is physical and logistical, not technical. The hard technical part is doing dynamic updates to the distributed systems and synchronizing transactions, but even that can be fudged decently if you are willing to go with the 90% solution that gives you most of the benefit.

So basically, there was a lot of activity on this sort of thing in the 90's, the technology was clearly driving in that direction, and it becomes easy once the underlying tools are in place.

I'll stand up for Akamai

[Evets]

Edge caching in general is obvious. The implementation is not, and that's what this lawsuit is about.

Limelight copied akamai's patented edge cache implementation, and violated enough of the patent to warrant this decision.

I can see how a bunch of people jump on the "obvious" bandwagon, developing an edge cache for a single enterprise would be relatively easy to do. Developing an edge cache infrastructure that will work across hundreds and thousands of different enterprises with different business and process infrastructures with varying and often conflicting traffic load patterns is an entirely different problem.

Let's look at the url rewriting aspect of it. The rewritten urls are specified to include popularity flag and use virtual hosts as a serial #. Something that would be obvious today, but in '98/'99 not so much.

Let's look at geographic dispersion. What is your obvious geographic dispersion methodology? A database like MaxMind has to offer? Those were few and far between in 1999. They use a network map. Further, they also consider the load of their servers when returning dns responses - so we're not just talking about getting the closest server to the edge, we're talking about getting the closest server with the lowest load at the edge. There's also the problem that the dns request is in most cases not coming from the client machine, but from a geographically disparate dns cache. The akamai system redirects users to a closer server if one exists and that situation is discovered by the web server.

There's also the situation that the network load of a particular server becomes too heavy while serving a particular request midstream (i.e. for audio and video). This patent covers switching the responsibility for handling a request to another server midstream.

This patent also includes anti-DOS/DDOS technology - a no brainer today, but in 1999? Not so much.

I wouldn't categorize Akamai as good or bad. I don't know much about the company itself. I can see the possibility of working around their patent to build a competitor - it's not an all-inclusive-only-we-can-do-CDN patent. But given the fact that limelight's foundation was built by a bunch of Akamai's ex-employees, it certainly isn't surprising that they chose the same path for resolving issues that Akamai did. And given Limelight's close ties with Microsoft, it's also not very surprising that they chose to emulate what they knew rather than innovating and improving upon the model.

Re:I'll stand up for Akamai

[Sinical]

But given the fact that limelight's foundation was built by a bunch of Akamai's ex-employees, it certainly isn't surprising that they chose the same path for resolving issues that Akamai did. And given Limelight's close ties with Microsoft, it's also not very surprising that they chose to emulate what they knew rather than innovating and improving upon the model.

Well, it's kinda late for moderation, but I thought I'd at least point out that this contention is incorrect. The engineers that created Limelight's architecture were not Akamai ex-employees. In fact, those half-dozen guys were pretty much serial employees of Limelight's founder and CTO, following him from company to company. I am sure that there are ex-Akamai employees there, just as Microsoft employs ex-Sun people and Google employs ex-Microsoft people. It would be hard for it to be otherwise since the space isn't huge and Akamai seems intent on sueing all competitors into the ground.

And I love how you equate Microsoft's relationship with Limelight as somehow tarring them with the brush of stagnation. Microsoft has close relationships with Intel and I'm sure Cisco and lots of other people. Do they fall into this same blackhole of "suck"? Someone had to serve Windows Updates and the Xbox Live content and so forth: wouldn't Microsoft partner with someone who could get the job done?

Re:I'll stand up for Akamai

[Evets]

I won't argue your points.

I think the main point I was trying to get to is that Akamai's patent/solution was innovative, distinct, and not obvious in 1999 when the patent application was originally filed, at least to me.

As far as my last paragraph goes, you don't need Microsoft in the equation to become lazy in the innovation department. All across the tech sector there are companies that have stronger business infrastructures than their innovation infrastructures. It seems at times the two things are in direct conflict. In my personal utopia, they are not.

in other news

[sentientbrendan]

slashdot has patented kneejerk reaction. Fox news contests.

Algorithms not patentable?

[Myria]

This is furthermore a mucky issue because according to patent law, algorithms are not patentable.

What about RSA, LZW, LZS and MP3?

Re:Algorithms not patentable?

[reebmmm]

Algorithms are not patentable. Particular implementations of algorithms are definitely patentable. Always have been. Machines that implement well-known equations from physics are definitely patentable.

In your case, implementing particular equations for the purpose of compression and encryption would definitely be patentable IF (that's a big IF) they also meet the other criteria for patentability.

Re:Algorithms not patentable?

[Anonymous Coward]

I love replies like this hat get modded up, but obviously only read one line of the post they reply to. Your counter-examples don't add anything to the discussion since the parent poster already cited a counter-example and addressed the very issue you mentioned. There are algorithms that are patented, yes. And that is inconsistent with the USPTO rules, yes.

Re:Akamai != Squid

[simong]

And how do you direct browsers to their nearest local cache? Squids can't do that on their own. That's where Akamai's technology comes in. Akamai's caching server, is about the same age as squid: proxying technology was developed to cope with slow connections across university and ISP networks by serving pages from closer to the user. Akamai extended this idea to multiple locations that communicated with each other and adapted networking concepts such as DNS and BGP to direct traffic to its nearest cache and minimise data transfer across the network. So it's not wrong to say that you *could* do it with squid, but Akamai don't, and the technology to achieve what Akamai does is over and above that of just using squids in different places. For that matter squid wasn't the first caching server either.

I don't get it. It's "Off-the-shelf" technology...

[jamcc]

I can go out and buy a GSLB device (several people make them: F5, Foundry, Cisco... pick one)...

I can buy a hosting account in multiple datacenters on multiple geographically dispersed areas (US east cost, US west coast, uk, germany, japan)...

I can set up Apache in proxy/cache mode at each location...

I can tag my images to pull from gslb-images.myserver.com...

But in doing so, I violate their patent of intellectual property? C'mon now.

I haven't invented any of this. It's all standard internet engineering technique. Next thing you know, you won't be able to cache to disk or load balance across multiple servers anymore.

Look at AOL, for example: View source on their home page. You'll see their images are being plucked off another server, and guess what-- the image server has "CDN" in the hostname.

That's just one example. We could go all day on this. Either finding prior art or more cases of infringement.

Geesh.

Re:By 1996 you could already BUY a system to do it

[Phroggy]

So, is Akamai infringing on your patent? If not, what are they doing differently that your patent doesn't cover?

Does this affect other CDNs?

[ZerdZerd]

Does this affect any other CDNs? Will they sue those too?