Earlier this week Skype suffered an immense outage, now the popular internet calling company has been hit with a patent infringement lawsuit according to TechCrunch.The plaintiff is Gradient Enterprises, who have filed a patent infringement suit against Skype in a New York court related to U.S. patent no. 7,669,207, or its “supernode network,” according to reports. Gradient first filed an application for the patent in 2004 and it was issued this past February. In plain terms, Gradient claims to have invented network monitoring and security software that operates in a dispersed way, capable of distributing control of a network throughout its nodes via mobile agents. The summary description reads:
A system for detecting, reporting and responding to network node-level occurrences on a network-wide level includes one or more first mobile agents, each of the one or more first mobile agents is hosted by one of a plurality of nodes in the network.
An event detection system communicates network event information associated with an event detected at one or more of the nodes in the network to the one or more first mobile agents, and a reporting system disseminates from the one or more first mobile agents information describing the detected event to one or more other nodes.
Here is a drawing obtained from the claim
Read the patent no. 7,669,207 <<<here
via TechCrunch