Akamai Wins Lawsuit to Protect Obvious Patent 173
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."
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.
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!
Non-obviousness (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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).
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.
Re:Non-obviousness - mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Everything is obvious (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 geographically distributed, you've got a setup just like Akamai.
This problem is almost as old as graphical browsers themselves.
Re:Everything is obvious (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.
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"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
Re:Everything is obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Everything is obvious (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 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 [slashdot.org] for a bit more detail.
Re:What a ridiculous summary (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.
Business Method Patents Suck. (Score:0, Insightful)
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...
With all due respect to the cleverness of the algorithm, your employer and yourself, software patents suck. A general method was patented which means that no other algorithm can do the same thing, no matter how clever. That's why software and business method patents suck life - they claim methods not real inventions. Because no method is ever really an invention, neither is an algorithm which is just a formal statement of methods.
This lawsuit cost Limelight $45 million bucks and it will cost us all much more as a monopoly has been granted on one of the few practical ways to move media around the internet from a central site. There are countless services that use this kind of method to share load out to a pool of participating machines, preferably close to the user. Hopefully the bastards won't be able to get Debian's NTP pool of the DNS system. What's left for media distribution is Alkamai and the much demonized and harassed P2P networks. How shitty.
Re:What a ridiculous summary (Score:5, Insightful)
READ THE CLAIMS TO FIND OUT WHAT IS BEING COVERED BY THE PATENT!!
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.
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.
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:Talk too much, know too little... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Algorithms not patentable? (Score:3, Insightful)
What about RSA, LZW, LZS and MP3?