How to Deal With Patent Trolls

Content delivery network provider Cloudflare has a bounty program, which rewards for people finding things like prior art to invalidate junk patents.

As a result, Cloudflare just defeated Sable IP and Sable Networks in their patent suit against them:

Once again, Cloudflare has proven that its unusual defense against meritless patent infringement claims effectively works to end so-called "patent trolling."

In a blog post, Cloudflare announced that its most recent victory—defeating a lawsuit filed by Sable IP and Sable Networks in 2021—was largely thanks to participants of Project Jengo. Launched in 2017, Cloudflare's program offers tens of thousands of dollars in awards to activate an army of bounty seekers and crowdsource submissions of evidence—known as "prior art"—that can be used to overcome frivolous patent claims or even invalidate patents that never should have been issued.

To find prior art, Project Jengo participants comb through academic papers, technical websites, and patent documents, helping Cloudflare explain in detailed petitions to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) why certain patents should be invalidated.

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To defeat Sable, Cloudflare offered $100,000 "to be split among winners that submitted strong prior art." Responding, Project Jengo participants spent three years tracking down dozens of submissions of prior art. Through those efforts, Sable's lawsuit—which initially "asserted around 100 claims spanning four patents against multiple Cloudflare products and features," Cloudflare said—was impressively narrowed to "a single asserted claim on a single patent."

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In court, pointing to prior art and sharing a Cloudflare engineer's expertise, the Cloudflare legal team broke down for the jury "the many reasons why" Sable's patent "does not describe anything that Cloudflare actually does."

It took a jury two hours to decide that Cloudflare was right, not just dismissing Sable's claims but invalidating Sable's patent permanently because prior art showed that "Sable’s patent covered, at best, only technology that had already been described by inventors at Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies—leading routing technology companies at the time."

So far, Cloudflare has awarded $70,000 to Project Jengo participants who helped the company defeat Sable. According to Cloudflare's blog, the company will announce the final $30,000 in awards after the "official conclusion of the case."

We need to fix our broken patent system.