Patent troll crushed by Cloudflare

Patent trolls are the worst. These companies buy up patents, never intending to use them for anything constructive. The patent portfolio are used only to sue companies for patent infringement. The claims are often spurious, but many companies settle rather than spend the money and time to fight them. Cloudflare is not one of those companies.

In 2016, Cloudflare fought back against Blackbird, using a crowd-sourced bounty program named Jengo to find prior art to invalidate the patents in question. Cloudflare won in court, and paid out cash to the Jengo participants who helped out. Project Jengo was retired after the victory, but was revived in 2021 to fight another patent troll, Sable. In February, a jury found that Cloudflare was not liable for infringement, and the settlement resulted in complete and utter defeat for Sable.

In the end, Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, grant Cloudflare a royalty-free license to its entire patent portfolio, and to dedicate its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can never again assert them against another company.

Let's repeat that first part, just to make sure everyone understands: 

Sable, the patent troll that sued Cloudflare back in March 2021 asserting around 100 claims across four patents, in the end wound up paying Cloudflare. While this $225,000 can't fully compensate us for the time, energy and frustration of having to deal with this litigation for nearly three years, it does help to even the score a bit. And we hope that it sends an important message to patent trolls everywhere to beware before taking on Cloudflare.

Cloudflare Blog

Cloudflare has already paid out $70,000 to participants in Jengo, and has $30,000 more to distribute to the final winners.

Previously: Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1: an encrypted, privacy-protecting DNS service