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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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: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"...

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.

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

[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: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).

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?

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

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...

[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.

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.

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?