<More problems for CMGI>Wednesday, January 31 7:45 AM SGT Search Pioneer Slams CMGI On Born-Again Patents
NEW YORK, NEW YORK, U.S.A., 2001 JAN 30 (NB) -- By Steven Bonisteel, Newsbytes.
Almost every dot-com investor has heard of David Wetherell, chief executive officer of CMGI Inc. [NASDAQ:CMGI], the Internet incubator-cum-holding-company behind such companies as AltaVista. But Wetherell must not have heard of Alan Emtage. Otherwise, Emtage suggests, CMGI's CEO might not have claimed that AltaVista engineers invented the guts of the Internet search engine.
Emtage, a co-developer of an early file-search protocol known as Archie that was first released in 1989, surfaced Monday to protest the CMGI chief's assertion earlier this month that his company would move to enforce its patents for indexing the Web with Internet-spider technology.
Emtage, now chief technical officer of Web-building company Mediapolis Inc., developed Archie with Peter Deutsch and Bill Heelan at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in order to help the Internet's then 200,000 or so users find files stored on file transfer protocol (FTP) servers.
Later, in 1991, a user-friendly application for navigating linked documents exploded online. The popularity of that interface, known as Gopher, obscured the early development by Tim Berners-Lee of the "hypertext" transfer protocol that would become the World Wide Web.
It was an era during which someone at the University of Nevada could create a Gopher search engine and call it "Veronica" just because there was already an FTP-search system known as "Archie." ("Gopher" got its name from the mascot at the University of Minnesota, where the engine was developed.)
But Emtage said Monday that CMGI's CEO must have ignored all that history when he told a reporter from Internet World that "virtually everyone out there who indexes the Web is in violation of at least several (AltaVista) patents."
That assertion may come as a surprise to many Net-search companies, including Terra Lycos [NASDAQ:TRLY], whose search spider was first developed by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and whose US predecessor, Lycos Inc., counted CMGI as its major shareholder before its merger with Spain's Terra Networks.
Emtage said he was "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. Archie, and other systems like Veronica had come up with and implemented these processes years before the Web even existed.
"Archie was crawling and indexed FTP sites with fairly sophisticated algorithms even as I was sitting at Internet Engineering Task Force meetings with Tim Berners-Lee, while he created the World Wide Web," Emtage said.
Emtage said the Archie system reached its zenith in 1995, when there were over 30 Archie "crawlers" cataloging files on the Internet.
Neither Mediapolis nor Emtage claimed to have patented similar technology. Instead, Mediapolis said Emtage "has watched with disappointment as long-standing precepts of Internet technology, developed in a climate of shared efforts and common good, have been privatized by over-zealous patent actions."
"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," Emtage said.
Emtage said he would offer his knowledge of Archie's long-ago inner workings to any developers who might become the targets of efforts by CMGI to defend its search patents.
A call from Newsbytes inquiring about the company's stand on the patents was not returned by CMGI spokespersons today.
asia.dailynews.yahoo.com |
