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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."
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...
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.