If Not Acquired, Limelight May Work With Other CDNs To Fight Akamai's 703 Patent

Why there is a lot of speculation on exactly what may happen to Limelight in terms of a potential acquisition, my bet is on AT&T or Level 3, there is also the possibility that Limelight may team up with other CDNs to fight Akamai's 703 patent if they are not acquired.

At the core of the 703 patent is the idea that Akamai has essentially patented all forms of delivering content on the web. Based on the ruling today, the court is basically saying that any content publisher that has a website with ANY embedded object (not just video) that is not delivered under the control of the content producer is infringing on the 703 patent. There was some very specific working about this in the ruling today and I will publish the exact wording shortly when I have the transcript.

Don't be surprised if Limelight rallies other CDNs to the patent fight under the belief that the 703 patent is too broad and is essentially patenting all content delivery on the Internet.

Comments

[Ike Elliott]

Limelight now has a huge incentive to negotiate a settlement with Akamai, assuming Akamai would cooperate. The uncertainty surrounding Limelight's business will severely hamper their ability to win and retain customers, until the uncertainty is resolved.

There are many parallels between Limelight and Vonage. Even if Limelight can settle with Akamai, they still face a Level 3 patent suit.

More at http://ikeelliott.typepad.com/telecosm/2008/03/akamai-to-limel.html

[Asher Harry]

How does this ruling impact other CDNs? Does this ruling imply that competition is over in the space? One would think that the VCs that recently funded companies like Panther would have accounted for this before investing... Put differently -- which AKAMAI competitors are at risk? Who stands to benefit?

[So True]

I can go out and buy a GSLB device (several people make them: F5, Foundry, Cisco... pick one)...

I can buy a hosting account in multiple datacenters on multiple geographically dispersed areas (US east cost, US west coast, uk, germany, japan)...

I can set up Apache in proxy/cache mode at each location...

I can tag my images to pull from gslb-images.myserver.com...

But in doing so, I violate their patent of intellectual property? C'mon now.

I haven't invented any of this. It's all standard internet engineering technique. Next thing you know, you won't be able to cache to disk or load balance across multiple servers anymore.

Look at AOL, for example: View source on their home page. You'll see their images are being plucked off another server, and guess what-- the image server has "CDN" in the hostname.

That's just one example. We could go all day on this. Either finding prior art or more cases of infringement.

Geesh.

[Steve Lerner]

You wouldn't be the first to try that... CDN built with off the shelf hardware typically does not succeed- the only CDNs that have grown to profitability, or near it, built their own (CDN here is defined as a multinetwork system that uses performance based load balancing for multi protocol content delivery)

This is why there are disputes over intellectual property involved in building a CDN- whoever owns the core IP for building a CDN essentially owns the only proven means to do so.