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Akamai & Digital Island Patent Clash 75

Posted by Hemos from the i-shall-duel-to-the-death dept.
rf600r writes: "In a NutShell: Akamai does content delivery. Digital Island does content delivery. (DI, however, actually has a network, too. Not just boxes.) In order to effectively deliver content to the end-user from the best server, Akamai uses a 'secret sauce' they say they invented. Digital Island uses a 'secret sauce,' too. Now, Akamai has sued Digital Island saying they stole Akamai's 'secret sauce.' DI responds with a counter-suit saying Akamai actually stole the idea from them. Is it even the same technology? Who knows ...
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Akamai & Digital Island Patent Clash More

Akamai & Digital Island Patent Clash

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  • This is just incredibly lame. It's reminiscent of 3dfx suing NVidia over multitexturing, and then NVidia filing 5 lawsuits against 3dfx for standard video controller technology. By the definitions of the patents, even ATI, Matrox, or Trident could've infringed on them. It's absolutely deplorable that lawsuits are becoming acceptable within the bounds of business ethics.

  • Comment removed (Score:5)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @02:41PM (#757728)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • read that as "Patent Cash"?

    Everyone has to pay us royalties to use cash now. And royalties on the royalties. Bwahahahaha.

    The really scary part is, I only thought it wasn't a story cause I knew what Akamai was. Throw a couple of bank names in instead and I'd have probably not noticed what it really said for a lot longer. :-)

    Sauth patents patenting things. Take that, bitch.

  • I figure about the time that business is done with this self-mutilation that economy will slide right into the hole. If the trends of the turn of the 20th Century are anything to go on, we're seeing it all over again--patents of all sorts will fall out of favor. Methinks that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

  • I think I'll patent the idea of putting a power button on home computers - I bet Apple would license it for the glory and ad-value.

    -----

  • Re:Cache and location... hmmm... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Probably because he has half a brain. Akamaized content servers rely on the fact that Akamai can figure out where on the network a request is comming from. It is NOT practical to put a HTTP redirect at the edge of every single network, in the hopes that it will get the server closest to the edge. It IS practical to let DNS do this for you. Not to say that it is overly simple, but it wouldn't be all that difficult to 'hack' DNS to include a simple network metric (like the AS number?) as part of the A records. This would allow ANYONE to have BIND spit back a specific IP address as the resolved IP for a specific name based on the source of the request!

    Of course, I am not 100% certain this is exactly how Akamai does this, but it DOES describe how I would solve the problem (and in fact summerizes a short paper I sent to the IETF about 3 years ago...)

    3 years ago is also about the same time that the guys that started Akamai finished thier research into the best way to get this stuff to work seamlessly...
  • This is simply yet another example of how patent law is used to harrass competitors. Reminds me of how $cientology abuses and attempts to redefine copyright law to attack their critics.

    Lee
  • Akamai is inserting urls with some funny server names like http://a388.g.akamai.net/f/388/21/15m/www.cnn.com/ images/hub2000/ad.info.gif (for the cnn f.e.) that funny names are then looked up by your browser and the reply of the DNS server should point you to the list of the "nearest" Akamai servers.
  • The problem with AS records is that you actually can't create a good working mechanism only knowing the routing metric. You have to know something about the bandwidth awailable (that you can't), or use some indirect methods like measuring latency and throughoutput.
  • Open Source has nothing to do with patent issues, other than that bad patents tend to unfairly interfere with software projects (both closed and open).

    Just because you Open Source your project doesn't mean you are immune from patent infringment claims. In fact, it is widely believed that you may actually be opening yourself up more fully to patent claims (witness NVidia vs 3dfx) because its easier to prove that you are in violation of the bad patent when the source code is easily available to the company that might sue you.

  • I think he doesn't realize how stupid he is. Just smile and nod; that's what I do.
  • From what little information there was in the article, it seems that both of the patents are still pending and thus you aren't going to find references to them in online databases.

  • The most funny thing about both of the technologies is that both of them are perfoming not as good as possible. For example you can have a look at http://www.terena.nl/conf/wcw/Proceedings/S4/S4-1. pdf - very nice paper that created a few hours long flame war between the authors and the Akamai people during the conference.

    What is more interesting for the Open Source people is that Internet 2 team is working on Digital Storage Initiative (should be at http://dsi.internet2.edu/) that is creating the Content Delivery Network for the educational and research organizations. I'm sure that they have already that "secret sauce" so if you have any code (not words) you can try to convince them to work with theirs code.

    The other funny thing about the Content Delivery Networks is that you can make them by yourself by integrating your own mirror in the Web Cache meshes (but this can be used mostly in Europe with a huge number of caches already installed).

  • sorry, cheap attempt at being a karma whore. i need more practice.
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    ICQ# 77863057
  • You are still a jackass. But no matter. I can cure that because I know where you live.
  • One of the things that always puzzled me about this approach is the need to re-calculate the metrics almost with every hit. There was a period of time early last year when the security mailing lists were full of people complaining about F5's product effectively acting like a scanner.

    My view on this is that once you've calculated a metric there is really no need to go an recalculate it so often, after all the changes in topology are not that frequent, in particular for non-US sites (fundamentally you are at the end of a pipe, often congested, to the USofA). I wonder how much congestion their high-priority ICMP traffic provoked...
  • It's all just Thousand Island salad dressing. Don't be fooled!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It's interesting you said that they are just using the prior art in a different way than everyone else. This constituates a new use for an old device, which is grounds for a patent. As long as it wasn't obvious to anyone at the time that someone applied for the patent then it's patentable.
  • Just so long as it isn't "special sauce"

  • Comment removed (Score:5)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @11:48AM (#757748)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Wired [wired.com] says Akamai and Sandpiper were the first to "use the trick of rewriting URLs as a hook into the alternative system." That is, Akamai's technology doesn't just perform routing-optimization, it breaks the connection between domain and location and rewrites the address entirely, using any of a large number of servers for the new route. A short time later or connecting from a different machine the redirection taking place is likely to be entirely different.
    Wired's article (dated August 99) states clearly Akamai and Sandpiper were the first companies to use algorithms for actual rewriting of addresses. The cofounder of Akamai, Danny Lewin wrote the algorithms as part of his thesis and mathematics and patented it.

  • Akamai said Digital Island is infringing on a patent awarded last month to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT licenses that technology exclusively to Akamai <...>. Digital Island said it believes it isn't infringing on the patent. The company has "patent pending claims for the same inventions claimed by MIT" that predate MIT's patent claim.

    DI need to have it implemented/published/writen/whatever one year before Akamai's patent was filed, then thay can nulify Akamai's patent. Any info on exact dates what was implemented when?


  • It is stipulated that the invention should not
    be obvious. Here we have two companies
    independently coming up with same tech (or so
    they claim), apparently at roughly the same time.
    This to me defines an obvious "invention".
    The court should invalidate both patent claims.
    'Course pigs will hover over frozen hell before
    our system serves the public interest.


  • Just like the KFC's "Colonel Sander's 17 Secret Spices", and Coca Cola's Top Secret Locked-In-The-Vault Formula, this case for "Secret Sauce" smells like another episode for the Mad Magazine's Spy vs. Spy series.

    Unfortunately, unlike the Mad Magazine's Spy Vs. Spy serial, there is no White Hat here.

    Both sides are suing each others because of patents, and both sides are determined to milk that patent (aka Secret Sauces) to the fullest, and we, the consumers, will end up footing the bills (legal and all other things).

    Sad, isn't it?

    Sad to see that our tech-sphere has been invaded by the invertibrate-lawyers.

  • Umn.

    Dunno why I'm even bothering, but if you do some simple subtraction, you'd see by user numbers that 'emerson' has been around since basically day one, and Willowick is a newbie.

    Different folks. Don't confuse the two.

    Thanks.

    --
  • Please. When your country goes down the crapper because of all this I hope you don't drag the rest of the world down with you. I see our beloved monopoly British Telecom is in the process of patenting hyperlinks, so the lunacy is spreading. I would also like to ask the clown who patented the windowing for Y2K method to have a word with me, since I first used that method in 1990 and he appears to be in violation of my intellectual (ha!) property. I think my sig says it all.
  • I'm not sure that Akamai just uses it's own cache servers - I run squid just as a transparent proxy for my own network, but I found that when one of the internal clients requested one of the Akamai indirected URL's, then I suddenly got a lot of packets (all blocked at the firewall) from an IP that reverse-resolved to machine 'ghost.akamai.com'.

    All these packets were addressed to port 1080 - this seems like Akamai may be trying to force my cache to pre-load selected content so they can look good...... but since I'm at the end of a S....l......o.....o......o......w link, that basically saturated my bandwidth, and acted as DoS.

    (Yes, SYN packets to 1080 are blocked at the firewall - but these were large data packets - maybe some attempted connection spoofing was involved?)

    Liquor
  • Call it a "Poor man's location finder," the way I did it. But DNS, however, is an intresting idea. Maybe Akamai pharzes DNS records to select the best server to go with. They're doing alot with DNS these days...

    ---
    Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
  • I have no experiences with interferences -- but a brief look at the Manual of Patent Examination Proceedure (the procedural bible of the Patent Office) section 2312 (Public Access to Files in an Interference Proceeding) indicates that access is basically the same as with normal patent applications. See http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/mpep_e7r 1_2300.pdf [uspto.gov]

    The public has access to issued patent applications and the file associated with the interference (the pleadings, judgement and such) if the interference involves at least one issued patent once the interference is over . Note that interferences are neither short nor fast. Access to pending patent applications involved in the interference is still restricted.

    Transalation: Unless Digital Island releases their patent application publically somehow (or the application issues as a patent), there will be no public access to it. At some point the interference proceedings may make it out to the public however since Akami's patent has issued.

    Disclaimer: This is not legal advice. Seek competent legal advice. I don't represent you. The opinions herein are my own and not those of my employer or anyone else.

  • I didn't see 'Windows beats Linux' anywhere in the story, or any mention of Napster.
  • But both companies have released press releases full of the usual lawyer-speak about how only one company is allowed to have an idea about a subject and basically we'll see you in court.
  • Talk about making yourself the laughing stock of the tech industry.
  • No, it looks more like Digital Forecast has no clue what it is talking about. Akamai may have been in business first, but Digital Island filed it patents TWO years before Akamai. Just in case you have been living under a rock for the last 100+ years, YOU CAN'T PATENT A CONCEPT! I guess they wern't first after all! BTW: Akamai has a bad habit of threatening/taking legal action against anyone who looks like a competitor. Not only did Akamai com in second, their technology is ONLY about the web. DI's tech is a low latency network for all types of applications.
  • is that like Arby's secret sauce??? mmm....
  • ..that the story has links to know what the fuck this is talking about. Otherwise, we'd all be clueless as to how to respond.

    ----------------
    Programming, is like sex.

  • The Truth is, both of these "technologies" look pretty straight forward. I love how pointie haired ones always want to make obvious programming a tradesecret. On the more interesting side: perhaps patents could serve the purpose of seeing who figured out the obvious first?

    I'll apply for the Making Font Colors Consistant Through Internet Documents Using References to Style Metadata patent next week. ;)

  • The respective press releases (Score:4)

    by SnakeStu ( 60546 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @11:20AM (#757765) Homepage

    This story seems a little weak on facts and links, so this might help. Here are the press releases...

    Enjoy...


  • I think this is akin to wearing the same thing as someone else at the office.

    Did they steal code? I doubt it... did they have the same idea? Of course! My experience from what little web-scripting I've done has shown that there are only so many ways to keep track of unique user-session content, so I imagine the way they implement the idea is also extremely similar (eg, long long URLs)...

    I imagine this was a top-level idea. Today in the US I heard that 60% of kids know what a 'modem' is, and only 23% of executives do.

    ----

  • Since when logic(or common sense for that matter) ever interfered with corporate policy(such as filing law suits)? This is BUSINESS we're talking about here, folks, don't try to figure it out. Heck, in the end they always end up spilling it all on the floor...
  • CNET Article [cnet.com]
    For those who dont want to cut & paste
  • to the CNET story [cnet.com] (which is actually from Bloomberg News but fairly content free AND from the 18th)

    --meredith
  • It seems to me that it would be hard to win a patent case, if the most specific you are going to get about your product is "secret sauce". Is there a better explaination somewhere, or is that actually how specific they got?
  • Ammm...
    Since when did knowing-what-you're-talking-about became a requirement for commenting?
    Or posting?
    They could've cut the Slashdot database in half if THAT was the case...
  • A link to the patent [ibm.com] in question.
  • if both sides had fully open sourced products, there wouldn't be a problem now would there?
    --
    Peace,
    Lord Omlette
    ICQ# 77863057
  • "Are you sure you included a URL? Didja test them for typos?"

    Who knows, indeed. This is typical of Slashdot's cathedral method of story selection, as compared to kuro5hin's [kuro5hin.org] bazaar method. Many eyes make all bugs shallow, and all that. I'm surprised ESR hasn't picked up on this yet.
  • Wait a min... any moron could figure out how the 'secret sauce' works. Let me see now:

    1. Get the IP address of the client.
    2. Forward to closest recorded cache server if there's a cache hit on that IP address.
    3. Ping it to get a timing. (If it fails, it's a client problem, just serve the content)
    4. Ask another set of servers that you know span north, south, east, and west to ping the client.
    5. Hand off the request (via HTTP's moved-temporary error) to the server who can ping the client faster.

    And for the record, I have not seen any data or information from either side of this lawsuit. But shouldn't be too hard to implement anyway. Proxy server anyone? [freshmeat.net]



    ---
    Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack

  • 'Secret sauce' (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's a good thing the poster used the term "secret sauce."

    Anything more technical than that obviously would have gone over the heads of slashdot readers, huh?
  • everybody knows it's thousand island dressing! Oh wait, we're not talking
    about McDonald's. My bad.

  • Here is the info on the patent in question, served up by IBM's patent server: US 06108703 [ibm.com]

  • Link to Akamai patent - not the same idea (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24, 2000 @12:13PM (#757779)
    Akamai patent [164.195.100.11]

    Digital Island press release [digitalisland.com]

    I would post the link to Digital Island's patent, but neither their press release nor the news stories I've seen contain the patent number. A search for "Digital Island" or "Sandpiper" on patents.uspto.gov turns up nothing. Any ideas?

    Note that these claims are not for the same thing. Akamai's patent, titled "Global Hosting Service", covers something which is basically their FreeFlow service, down to very specific details. It talks about modifying a site's pages to point at Akamai, using DNS to direct users at the optimal host for them, specific methods of redundancy for web and DNS servers, specific algorithms for overflowing between regions in case of overload (use of a "min-cost multicommodity flow algorithm"), and so forth. While I'm not keen on software patents in general, this seems like one of the less sinister ones; it is nonobvious and highly specific, not a patent-the-world sort of thing.

    Digital Island has been doing content delivery for a while, and as they've been outperformed by Akamai, the workings of their service have been getting closer and closer to what Akamai is doing; Akamai argues that they've gotten to the point of basically copying. I have no idea whether their claim has merit; maybe someone who is more familiar with these services could comment.

    DI's infringement suit is based on a patent on "fingerprinting" content to check for freshness. I don't know what their patent claim is; my only guesses seem like pretty obvious things, like checking MD5 hashes for web content against those in a cache. But it's clearly a very small part of a content delivery system, and not at all the same thing that Akamai's patent covers.

    DI also claims to have preexisting patent-pending claims for the same thing Akamai has patented, but since it's not an actual patent, I'm not sure how to examine this for myself.

  • Wrong...

    Your explination requires special software running at the contents original source, and it would take too long to find the initial connection. That's not how Akamai works.

  • invertibrate-lawyers. Score -1: Redundant.
  • No one has to "steal" anything to be sued for patent infringement.

    In the US, patents grant a 20-year monopoly to the person who can prove they thought of something first*. Say you and I don't know each other, I invent something, and you invent it the next day. I then get a patent. By law, I can sue you for patent infringement if you're still using your invention. I can sue you, even though you were just as inventive than me. All that matters is that I was a day earlier.

    There's usually no pejorative undercurrent to patent infringement cases, actually. Patent infringement cases are usually just coldblooded strategic marketing in action.

    ----

    * Yeah, yeah, this is simplified -- in the US, there are also tons of rules about whether you kept it s3kr1t enough, whether someone else can prove they did it first, etc etc.

  • In conclusion, maybe all the Slashdot editors have been so drunk, they have hired minions of horny monkeys to approve story submissions. Can it get any worse? Hopefully, only better..

    Discussion sites based on the Scoop engine [kuro5hin.org] let the users pick the stories. Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org] is the most popular Scoop site.


    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • Someone (maybe the FSF) needs to get a anti-patent granted for lawsuits! A sufficient obfuscated, buzzword-compliant application could probably get by patent examiners; look what they've already granted patents for ;-) Then when someone tries to sue, step in and tell them they can't, you have a patent on the lawsuit!
  • Using different A records in DNS depending of the location of who is requesting the IP of the name, so that you can send him to a server closer to him.

    No big deal. No point of patenting such an evidence.
  • Sorry, but these systems are a bit more complicated than your little open source HTTP proxies.
  • This would not be a problem if people weren't re-inventing the wheel all the time because one idiot was trying to hide "what the man did behind the curtain" from everybody else.

    I hope they both are forced to put the code out for us to laugh at.

  • Damn. I forgot that part.
    Then I guess that there is nothing wrong with the story. I stand corrected.

    ----------------
    Programming, is like sex.

  • Not only did Hemos forget to include a link or two, he forgot to close the italics too :)

    While I'm at it, does anyone know what exactly te patent(s) in question are for? To be honest, I'm too lazy to go look them up. Aren't they the companies that help Yahoo, etc. work more quickly?

  • Re:The Truth (Score:3)

    by mesocyclone ( 80188 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @11:29AM (#757790) Homepage Journal
    Bouncing comments:"The Truth is, both of these "technologies" look pretty straight forward. I love how pointie haired ones always want to make obvious programming a tradesecret. On the more interesting side: perhaps patents could serve the purpose of seeing who figured out the obvious first?"

    No... patents serve the purpose of seeing who is willing to go through the BS to patent an obvious idea that others may have had for decades. They also serve the purpose of showing how clueless the USPO is - by issuing patents on techniques that have been in use for decades.

    If not stopped, software and "business idea" patents are going to kill the entreprenurial goose that has laid the golden eggs for the US economy!

    Patents were considered so important to innovation that they are provided for in the US Constitution, a pretty short document. But patents issued by an incompetent bureaucracy to those who are copying ideas in use for ages, or to those who patent things that are trivially obvious, violent the intent of the constitution.

    There has been a gold rush for patent seekers since the US Supreme court ruled that well known business methods, implemented in software, can be patented. People have been patenting every idea that has been in use for ages, at the expense of the rest of us who are not clued in to this or don't have the time, money or sociopathy to join in this greedfest. The odds are that if you are doing any programming for any sort of business, you are in violation of patents of all sorts.

    IT IS RIDICULOUS!
  • ...what are the odds they both just stole it from Inktomi?
  • For a second, I thought we were going to have the biggest flame-fest in Slashdot history: I read that as "Akamai & Digital Island Patent CASH."


    --


  • Put the mayonaise out in the sun!

  • I'd guess they're these "speed up your internet connection" proggies or some crap like that...
  • "Digital Island said it believes it isn't infringing on the patent. The company has "patent pending claims for the same inventions claimed by MIT" that predate MIT's patent claim, according to Digital Island's press release."

    Under the U.S. patent offices law, you are given a specific time to challenge a patent. Since DI's application predates Akamai's, they might be given a chance.

  • How do you eat soup in the matrix...?

    Easy, you heat it in the can and drink it. Failing that you use a fork, fish out the lumps (veggies, chicken, small children...) then drink the rest. So what if there is no spoon! I doubt the matrix has stopped human ingenuity. Or fingers.

    Oh, and to keep this vaguely on topic, in relation to the story, if 3 bands can come up with the same song title in one year (The power of Love, 1984-85) I'm sure these 2 jackoff companies could have the same idea. They're out to make a quick buck. Fucking dickheads. Oh wait, that's standard .com mentality, I stand corrected...

  • Re:I wonder... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Inktomi is a CACHEing company, that also sells a rather simple way of pre-loading caches. Akamai and Digital Island don't require that your access be redirected via another device. They both rely on DNS hacks to make sure the content comes from a geographicly close box.

    Inktomi's 'solution' is a confidence trick played on the foolish and unwary. The only way it can work is if you can get EVERY edge device on every network you have customer's on to go through your redirect switches!
  • Obviously, any patent suit is just going to hurt both parties, but it seems like Akamai is the "good guys" in this case. According to Digital Forecast [cjb.net], Akamai was in business a long time before Digital Island, so it seems they have a pretty legitimate claim to the concept here. After all, they were first...

  • What happens... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    when one company that will never be profitable sues another company that will never be profitable for the rights to a technology that is incapable of growing a profitable company around it. I guess we'll just have to find out...

  • In other news (Score:4)

    by Tairan ( 167707 ) on Sunday September 24, 2000 @11:31AM (#757800) Homepage
    The formible Slashdot [slashdot.com] (Nastaq - ANDV ) has fallen so low as to actually post stories that appear to be nothing more than rumors. While this has happened before, often submitted by frequent reader Anonymous Coward, this is the first time a story has been posted without a link, leading hundreds of faithful readers to assume Slashdot has ran out of "News for nerds, stuff that matters."

    Recently, Slashdot.com has been posting stories with malformed links, links pointing to the incorrect address, and stories misgarbled to the point where the reader cannot click through to a web page or understand the entire article. Meanwhile, many readers have been submitting news articles about free domain names, new anti spam legislation, and even the popular "Microsoft Plan to Take Over the World. "

    Thankfully, several readers were able to quickly post links to today's story.

    In conclusion, maybe all the Slashdot editors have been so drunk, they have hired minions of horny monkeys to approve story submissions. Can it get any worse? Hopefully, only better..

  • The arrogance of some is truly ammusing. Don't not fall into the easy trap of thinking closed source code is of poor quality. Making that assumption is as bad as thinking people who encrypt email have something to hide.

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