On Friday February 29th 2008, a ruling came down in the Akamai and Limelight Networks patent suit awarding Akamai $45,526,946 finding that Limelight Networks infringed on Akamai's patents. Akamai is also asking the court to issue a permanent injunction prohibiting Limelight from continuing to sell CDN services.

While the damage claims are not that big of a deal in terms of the size of settlement Limelight would have to pay, the real question is what Limelight does next. There are a few potential things that could happen which are all going to be based on whether or not the court issues an injunction in Akamai's favor. If Akamai gets the injunction, Limelight options will be limited as they won't have a lot of time to stay an injunction.

Limelight might be able to find a work around on its network to avoid the infringing patent and could always potentially come to some kind of licensing terms with Akamai, but my guess is that they already have a work around on their network to avoid the infringement. They have known about the suit for a long time and hopefully, have prepared different plans to put into action once the ruling came out.

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Mike Barnett COO of Severn Stream Media Networks, Inc. released this statement.

"This is an unfortunate blow for the CDN market, while all CDN's respect the Akamai patent, we believe that this patent is to broad in the range that it covers".

"I can only hope that Limelight will appeal this court ruling".

News piece sourced from http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/02/akamai-awarded.html