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Patent troll Sable pays up, dedicates all its patents to the public! (blog.cloudflare.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 184 points 2 months ago (2 children)

This is absolutely awesome: 👍😎

Project Jengo is Cloudflare’s effort to fight back against patent trolls by flipping the incentive structure that has encouraged the growth of patent trolls who extract settlements out of companies using frivolous lawsuits. We do this by asking the public to help identify prior art that can invalidate any of the patents that a troll holds, not just the ones that are asserted against Cloudflare.

Emphasis by me.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

CloudFlare makes more than a billion dollars a year in revenue. The work done for this project is probably worth millions to them and they paid out $100,000. That sounds like bullshit to me. Let corporations hire lawyers instead of doing their work for a pittance.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (1 children)

They should have increased the payout. It should have been a percentage of what CF would have paid had they paid the troll.

I don't expect attorneys to be experts in technical work. Even those who are won't have the same experience as the literal millions of techies out there who know really obscure technology.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I've worked on processing submissions for this project. Honestly, it probably ends up just costing them more to do this program, which is mostly just a paid PR activity. The overwhelming majority of submissions, and I mean like 99%, are either not prior art in the sense of patent law or were already retrieved by the law firm on the case.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's like an IRL DDOS

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

And it's less annoying than a stadium full of people with vuvuzelas.