More than just Cloud Music Services threatened by Kazaa founders patent ruling

Cast your minds back a few years along with Niklas Zennstrom (of Skype fame) an Australian businessman Kevin Bermeister was one of the key players at the Kazaa; the early days peer-to-peer site.  Bermeister and Kazaa finally fell foul of the Australian Federal courts in 2006.

Quote: In the 'Kazaa' case (Universal Music vs Kazaa Networks), the Federal Court found that Bermeister and five others associated with the companies Sharman Networks and Altnet had "knowingly allowed Kazaa users to illegally swap copyrighted songs."

Well here is a turn-up for the books. The Music worlds Nemesis has been granted three new US patents which his company plans to use to demand license fees from hosted music download service providers such as Apple and Google.  Oh the irony; the same music industry that is relying on sales through only line stores is now at the mercy of the guys they tried to have stuck in the State Pen'

But more seriously the rulings could effect the wider delivery of content delivery industry as CDNs work by storing content all over the world, and as a user requests content, working out the copy that can be delivered most efficiently. De-duplication of content helps make the process more efficient – e.g., by making sure that each node in a CDN only holds only a single copy of any particular file; while access control touches on the subscriber interaction.  All of which can be considered by legal minded folks to be covered by the patents.  

Also, I wonder how this will work within organisations and vendors who will want to use distributed data techniques in Cloud type environments which share similar characteristics.