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Akamai Wins Lawsuit to Protect Obvious Patent
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Mar 02, 2008 06:25 PM
from the keeping-things-locked-down dept.
from the keeping-things-locked-down dept.
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."
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I'm in trouble now. (Score:5, Funny)
Google has used Akamai's network (Score:2, Informative)
Akamai Made Microsoft Run on Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:I'm in trouble now. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [akamai.net]
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...
Parent
Re:I'm in trouble now. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
They are now under the "business process" umbrella. The courts are accepting these so far.
Re:I'm in trouble now. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Parent
Re:I'm in trouble now. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 th
Algorithms not patentable? (Score:3, Insightful)
What about RSA, LZW, LZS and MP3?
It may be obvious but (Score:4, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Genuity in 1997, "Hopscotch" protocol (Score:5, Informative)
I found this article ( http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1997_Dec_10/ai_20053332 [findarticles.com] ) rather easily, going back to 1997.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I can't find it, but somebody patented storage in the door of a refrigerator. That seems obvious, but a true improvement. They had 17 years to exploit the monopoly on refrigerators with door storage.
My wife worked at a paper company. They had patents on how to cut cardboard to make containers (french fry boxes, etc)
Obvious stuff can be patented.
Re:It may be obvious but (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Only parts are very obvious (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
So Obvious, people were already doing it (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
They are talking about Edge Side Includes (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It may be obvious but (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [uspto.gov] 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
Parent
Everything is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
The sex and violence of a patent is in the claims. go read em [uspto.gov] 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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> 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 geographicall
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really. What you describe is basically just offloading static images to an unsuspecting third party. If it's a popular website then t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Everything is obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Parent
Re:Everything is obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
No, I don't think that is what is being said. It was obvious to some people in 1992.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It was already stated that algorithms cannot be patented. And that's all that Akamai se
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
By 1996 you could already BUY a system to do it... (Score:5, Interesting)
-Mark Kriegsman
Founder, Clearway Technologies
Parent
Non-obviousness (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Non-obviousness - mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Technological ignorance in the legal profession (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Hm (Score:2)
What a ridiculous summary (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What a ridiculous summary (Score:5, Insightful)
READ THE CLAIMS TO FIND OUT WHAT IS BEING COVERED BY THE PATENT!!
Parent
Re:What a ridiculous summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
So they've patented (Score:5, Interesting)
Brilliant!
What a novel use of technology.
Surely this is just amazing. Who ever woulda thunk that computers could do things for us automatically?
Talk too much, know too little... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [akamai.com], 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: (Score:3, Insightful)
That almost makes sense, except that even according to the Akamai page you link to...
I'll stand up for Akamai (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)