This is great. I do worry that a future more sinister malicious patent troll could read all the wonderful strategy Cloudflare used and work around them. Hopefully Cloudflare legal team got stronger!

Kudos to the likes of Cloudflare and (yesteryears’) Newegg that fought these trolls.

I shudder at the thought of how many of the existing legacy industries outside the computer space are still riddled with these patent portfolio companies :(

As a former patent examiner, I was struck by how low the payout for Project Jengo was. $125,000 for all people submitting prior art? (There were hundreds of submissions, so it's split among many people.) I would like to help out with such things and I think I have the experience to do it well, but even being a GS-7 patent examiner making $75,000 per year is a better deal! That's especially true given that Cloudflare's not only expecting people to find prior art, but to also write the legal arguments about why it reads on Sable's claims.

If they're serious about their prior art bounty program, they're going to need to increase the bounties. Actual patent search firms charge a lot more money, and even lowly paid bureaucrats make a lot more.

I've read the article but I'm not sure I understand :

1. Why / how did sable give up its patent portfolio? It's handwaved as "lots of post trial stuff" but what's the nutshell of it? Is it because they're marked invalid? Is it punitive ruling? Something else?

2. There were 4 patents brought up against cloud flare, but sable gave up "its entire portfolio". Does that mean these 4 were their entire portfolio? Or did they have to give up patents outside of suit itself? If so, how and why? Did sable hang up the hat as a business?

The excerpts from the Borchers testimony are a riot.

> The responsible business people in this business actually sit down and talk to folks before they sue them, fair?

> Fair.

> And you don't do that, do you, sir?

> No.

I'm not a fan of Cloudflare in general. I think "Browser Integrity Check" is banal malware, the McAfee of the Web 2.0 era. But this? I love this. Settling with a patent troll out of court is cowardly.

Kudos to Cloudflare. The mere existence of patent trolls should be enough to see how sick our current intellectual properties and copyright laws are.

Good on ya!

> the Western District of Texas against patent trolls

That means they had really good lawyers.

I had a friend that lived in that area, many moons ago.

He showed me a few of their local newspapers. They were filled with stories about "plucky innovators," fighting against "corporate vested interests."

It seems they have a fairly well-prepped jury pool, thereabouts.

Why are patent trolls allowed to exist? A company that only holds patents and does no productive job with them (research, production, ...) should not be allowed to exist. It stifles development and innovation for the short-lived monetary gain of a few people.

Cloudflare's redeemed themselves, bigtime.

A lot of patent trolls have no assets, and don't own anything except the patents they're currently milking. Then they go out of business, and there's nothing to sue. Sable apparently made the mistake of building up a portfolio and living on.

> Proving invalidity to a jury is hard. The burden on the defendant is high: Cloudflare needed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that claim 25 is invalid. And, proving it by describing how the claim is obvious in light of the prior art is complicated.

You're not kidding.

> Sable’s damages expert, Stephen Dell, told the jury that Sable was owed somewhere between $25 million and $94.2 million in damages.

"damages experts" == nice work if you can get it. The damage expert in the Apple v. Samsung trial that I went to was paid $2 million. "How much are you getting paid?" is always one of the first things they get asked on cross-examination.

> Sable has agreed to dedicate its entire patent portfolio to the public. This means that Sable will tell the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that it gives up all of its legal rights to its patent portfolio

Left unsaid is whether this includes anything other than the patents that they already lost on.

Anyhow: great work, Cloudflare.

I really wish this settlement included disclosing what the other trolled parties ("including Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks") paid.

We seriously need patent reform. I propose all patents should require a prototype to be demonstrated that embodies all claims in the patent.

I consider this a victory for creativity, freedom and technological progress. Let the entrepreneurs innovate and execute without fear of legal suffocation!

Patents should have a triviality clause in them, so if you can prove that they're trivial to create and implement and be thus invalid if they are.

On one hand, you have patents where someone needed to do thousands of experiments, often costly, years of research to invent some kind of procedure to do X and thus should have some protections from others just taking the implementation and doing it cheaper, because they don't have the development costs. On the other, you can patent "Page down button on the keyboard moves the screen down one full page (A4) instead of one screen size"

Could someone explain to me why it was decided that Sable will release the patents to the public?

In a sane law system, the existence of a company as a mere "box of patents" without any real product currently or previously on the market would be illegal, and these patent trolls won't exist...

So Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks paid millions to Sable. Sable paid $225k to Cloudflare, and won't use them again against anyone.

Sounds like they don't need to. Well played Sable. Enjoy your money.

I really wish we could publicly shame the people behind these abuses or provide some other incentive to correct bad behavior other than speeding-ticket sized fines.

In other news, as an investor, this tells me Cloudflare is technologically ahead of the other older companies who apparently were not sure they could defend against the claims.

Congratulations to Cloudflare! Stepping up as the Newegg of the 2020s! Proud to be a customer.

Thank you cloudflare! Fighting patents is god's^god work.

Patents are poison. Patenting your invention is like poisoning your children. Never do it.

We need to abolish these things.

They were a great way to build a centralized public library of all new inventions in the early days of the Union at no cost to the government, but now are purely a drag on innovation and society and create horrible incentives that lead to things like the Opioid crisis.

^god feel free to find/replace this with nature/universe/humanity etc.

Good news! There should be a rule that you have to use a patent in X years (much less than the lifetime) so its harder to do this behavior of hoarding a patent.

Please please please banish the patent system already. It is solely used by corrupt lawyers to persecute and rob successful entrepreneurs.

Well, it's nice to know that Sable's entire portfolio is going into the public domain, it's a shame that the likely 50-100 other shell companies owned by this troll still have an arsenal of useless, but incredibly complicated, patents to use to extort money.

A just world would involve piercing the corporate veil and imposing personal consequences on the owner of this company.

Someone messed with the wrong guy.

If you don't mind the language, the first minute of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLLt9bnRdlE comes to mind for how to deal with incompetent trolls. Comedy gold.

Lotta proposed solutions to the patent troll problem in this comment section, and they all have bad unintended consequences. So here's mine:

Institute a new tax on rent-seeking. Tax rent-seekers for close to 100% of the value they extract (basically a version of Georgism generalized to everything, instead of just real estate).

This would require basically a second IRS, and they would occasionally get things wrong and stifle value-producing businesses, but if it was at all effective it would be a net benefit to the economy instead of a net drag on it, and it could easily pull in enough revenue to let us eliminate income tax.

It's amazing that they got them to admit, "yup, we are patent trolls, nothing we do is reasonable, suing people is our entire business, you got us, we are giving our patents so we can't do this again".

What does "to the public" mean in this instance? Are they going to an open source patent pool or something?

Go Cloudflare! Public good!

Now, hopefully this emboldens others who have been suffering from patent trolls or ADA claims to fight back.

Bambu Labs vs Stratasys would be another wonderful fight that would push community driven development forward.

Would love to see results of all such prior-art research work going to EFF and patent offices to build a database for troll-crushing by anybody who needs it. Once refutation is made much easier and far less expensive then is much harder for trolls to operate.

> We do this by asking the public to help identify prior art that can invalidate any of the patents that a troll holds

It's easy to split patents into separate companies for lawsuits, so it's harder or impossible to find these other patents.

Can someone explain what a "line card" is that a network card isn't?

Has Cloudflare stated anywhere how much their defense cost them (or their insurance)?

I would love more details on how the case transitioned to the counter-suit. I feel like going from Cloudflare owing millions to dissolving all the troll's patents was more complex than the article implies.

Today the world is a better place.

Thank you!

These patent trolls are greedy, extractive, and contribute nothing to society while wasting vast public and private legal resources.

Fuck. Them. Excellent work to the entire litigation team at Cloudflare.

Are patent trolls a uniquely American disease or do they just thrive in a patent rich environment which America is?

I don't recall any famous European patent trolling cases.

Is there a list of the patents being dedicated to the public somewhere? I would love to know if there's anything useful among them.

Why is patent trolls even a thing? I thought you had to have a clear intention of using the patent in a product for it to be valid. How is it not a 5 minute court case showing how the patent trolls have no employees other than lawyers, which shows clearly that there is no intent to make a product?

Kudos to Cloudflare. Patent trolls are parasites. The sooner they are all put out of business, the better.

A Project Jengo grant for using Agents/LLMs to identify prior art could be a fantastic experiment..

Weren't folks lobbying for new laws to make these defenses stop working again?

Are there useful patents (i.e. worth using) in the Sable portfolio, or is it all trivial bullshit and obsolete hardware?

This is a small win for a company, but one giant win for mankind.

patent trolls have a special place in hell, next to the boiler room

Thank you Cloudflare (there, I said it for you)

> Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, ... and to dedicate its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can never again assert them against another company.

Makes me wonder if Cloudflare could have sued to "life the corporate veil" and go after the people who owned / operated the company. (IE, sue them so they loose their homes.)

Also makes me wonder if this is in the playbook the next time a patent troll comes sniffing around.

Somewhat related: In MA, to fight NIMBY-ism, we passed a law that people suing new housing developments can be forced to put up a deposit, without requiring proof that the case has merit. I wonder if a similar law could help with patent trolls: IE, making it easier that the plantiff put up a deposit when suing for violating their patent.

Hum... Doesn't clouldfare have patents of their own? Don't they enforce them? Did they turn them to the public domain? You have to love hypocrites.

What a massive waste of human effort. Patent trolls should be publicly executed.

It is really sad to see kost companies refused to fight. Congrats on that one Cloudflare, may that serve as an example to destroy those grifters.

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