Out-Law News 2 min. read
01 Feb 2001, 12:00 am
In an interview this month with Internet World Magazine, David Wetherell, CMGI CEO, said of the 38 patents his company holds and the 30 additional that it has applied for, "We believe that virtually everyone out there who indexes the web is in violation of at least several of [AltaVista's] key patents." He continued, "If you index a distributed set of databases - that's what the internet is. And even within intranets, that's one of the patents."
When asked by Internet World if he intended to pursue enforcement of these patents, Wetherell said, "Yes, we will. Coming up in the first quarter of 2001."
However, Alan Emtage of New York has spoken out against the claims of Wetherell. Emtage created "Archie," a search engine that came “long before AltaVista started searching the internet.”
The first version of Archie was released in 1989. Using FTP, a precursor to the HTTP protocol of the of the World Wide Web, Archie searched, or "crawled," public FTP sites, indexing their contents for easy access by internet users. At its peak in 1995, there were over 30 Archie crawlers located around the world searching and cataloguing millions of files.
Emtage, says he was “surprised and saddened” when he read Wetherell's comments, which prompted him to review some of the patents referred to. "Though I'm not a lawyer, the patents being 'defended' by CMGI/AltaVista include basic concepts that were incorporated into the Archie system years before the World Wide Web even existed," said Emtage.
"Archie was crawling and indexed FTP sites with fairly sophisticated algorithms even as I was sitting at Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meetings with Tim Berners-Lee while he created the World Wide Web," Emtage continued.
Emtage, now Chief Technical Officer of an internet engineering company, said that he has “watched with disappointment as long-standing precepts of Internet technology, developed in a climate of shared efforts and common good, have been privatised by over-zealous patent actions.”
"I'm amused, or more accurately, bemused, by the idea that such basic concepts underlying internet search engines could be patented by a latecomer like CMGI/AltaVista," Emtage said.
Emtage has also put out an open letter to the programming community stating that he is happy to provide further information and assistance to anyone who is approached by CMGI in an effort to defend the patents in question.
See also:
AltaVista will enforce its search engine patents, OUT-LAW News, 26/01/2001
BT enforces its claim over hyperlink patent, OUT-LAW News, 18/12/2000
Controversy over hyperlinking, OUT-LAW News, 21/06/2000
BT reveals its hyperlink patent, OUT-LAW News, 20/06/2000