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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."
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.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
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!
How we know is more important than what we know.
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 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.
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"...
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.
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 $45 million bucks and it will cost us all much more as a monopoly has been granted on one of the few practical ways to move media around the internet from a central site. There are countless services that use this kind of method to share load out to a pool of participating machines, preferably close to the user. Hopefully the bastards won't be able to get Debian's NTP pool of the DNS system. What's left for media distribution is Alkamai and the much demonized and harassed P2P networks. How shitty.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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.
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.
sic transit gloria mundi
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.
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.
What about RSA, LZW, LZS and MP3?
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager