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

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

[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.

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.