CAMBRIDGE, MASS. - A federal judge in Boston has granted Akamai Technologies its motion for a permanent injunction against Digital Island to stop it from running its Footprint content delivery service, the latest twist in a legal battle that began nearly two years ago.
Digital Island, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Cable & Wireless says the ruling issued late last week has no impact on the company or its customers since it is aimed at a defunct technology.
"The injunction is a legal technicality about a legacy part of the CDN that was abandoned some time ago," says Chris Albinson, chief strategy officer for Exodus, a Cable & Wireless Service, which is the name of the business unit formed by the integration of C&W acquisitions Exodus and Digital Island.
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Akamai President Paul Sagan, however, claimed in a statement that he believes Digital Island "cannot effectively operate its content delivery service without violating these key claims of the patent."
The patent, 6,108,703, covers technology that involves renaming URLs to prepend a CDN host name to a domain name and path, directing content requests to edge caching servers. Digital Island claims it no longer uses that prepending method.
U.S. District Court Judge Rya W. Zobel will issue the final wording of the injunction to be granted against Digital Island, Akamai says.
Last year, a federal jury in Boston found that Digital Island's Footprint CDN did infringe on Akamai's patent '703, but also invalidated three of Akamai's other patent infringement claims. Akamai filed for the injunction against Digital Island shortly after that ruling.
A month later, in February, Akamai took aim at rival Speedera Networks, claiming its content delivery technology also infringed on Akamai patents. In addition, it accused Speedera, which specifically targets Akamai customers on its Web site, of unfair competition due to "false and misleading statements."
The battle between Akamai and Speedera took another turn last month as the companies traded lawsuits and Akamai accused Speedera of trade secret theft. The FBI visited Speedera's headquarters in response to an affidavit filed by Akamai and searched CTO Richard Day's office, Speedera Vice President Gordon Smith says.
Akamai claims Day, beginning in February of this year, broke into databases protected by Keynote Systems to get access to competitive performance information Akamai kept regarding new and current customers.
Speedera denies any wrongdoing. Smith says that license agreements with Keynote make clear "that the performance data belongs to Keynote and not to its customers."
"Any information that they alleged we obtained is not proprietary. And we certainly did not hack into any secure servers," he says.
Daniel Berkowitz, director of corporate communications at Keynote, says that while Keynote does own the data, it licenses out its use only to customers who have subscribed and paid for that specific data. "You need a password to view data and access it," he says. He wouldn't comment on specifics related to the case.
Meanwhile, Speedera filed a lawsuit of its own, claiming Akamai has been spreading false information about the company.
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