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January 29, 2001
ARCHIE-CREATOR RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT CMGI SEARCH PATENTS NEW YORK CITY -- The creator of the Internet's first search engine, Archie®, today raised serious questions about statements made by the chief executive of Internet holding company CMGI regarding patents its AltaVista property holds for Internet searching. In a January 15, 2001 interview 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." But long before AltaVista started searching the Internet, there was Archie. The first version of Archie released in 1989, with second and third releases in 1990 and 1993. 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 cataloging millions of files. Archie's creator, Alan Emtage, 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 Web engineering company Mediapolis, inc., 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. But when he saw Wetherell's quotes, he decided it was time to take action. "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 lamented. "Archie, and other systems like Veronica (which indexed Gopher sites) had come up with and implemented these processes years before the Web even existed." 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. Emtage created Archie while co-founding Bunyip Information Systems, Inc., the first company in the world devoted specifically to providing Internet applications and services. Emtage has chaired the Internet Engineering Task Force's working groups on Internet Anonymous FTP Archives (IAFA) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URLs, URNs and URCs). In 1997 Emtage joined Mediapolis (http://www.mediapolis.com) where he has overseen projects for Bertelsmann, Johnson & Johnson, Sony and the New York Times.
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