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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."
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?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
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"...
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.
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).
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
... 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?
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
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
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.
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.
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.