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

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.

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: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: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"...

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: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: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.

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.