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Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Support a Bounty for Prior Art

Was slightly involved with an effort regarding patent trolls.  Very long since I touched on this.   Push obviousness.   Like this approach. Agree its the way to go.  PTO needs to be evolved.   Which reminded me of:   Trolls are 'Non practicing entities'   MUCH more at the link, though business-IP technical.

Project Jengo Redux: Cloudflare’s Prior Art Search Bounty Returns

04/26/2021, By Doug Kramer  in Cloudflare's Blog. 

Here we go again.

On March 15, Cloudflare was sued by a patent troll called Sable Networks — a company that doesn’t appear to have operated a real business in nearly ten years — relying on patents that don’t come close to the nature of our business or the services we provide. This is the second time we’ve faced a patent troll lawsuit.

As readers of the blog (or followers of tech press such as ZDNet and TechCrunch) will remember, back in 2017 Cloudflare responded aggressively to our first encounter with a patent troll, Blackbird Technologies, making clear we wouldn’t simply go along and agree to a nuisance settlement as part of what we considered an unfair, unjust, and inefficient system that throttled innovation and threatened emerging companies. If you don’t want to read all of our previous blog posts on the issue, you can watch the scathing criticisms of patent trolling provided by John Oliver or the writers of Silicon Valley.

We committed to fighting back against patent trolls in a way that would turn the normal incentive structure on its head. In addition to defending the case aggressively in the courts, we also founded Project Jengo — a crowdsourced effort to find evidence of prior art to invalidate all of Blackbird’s patents, not only the one asserted against Cloudflare. It was a great success — we won the lawsuit, invalidated one of the patent troll’s other patents, and published prior art on 31 of Blackbird’s patents that anyone could use to challenge those patents or to make it easier to defend against overbroad assertion of those patents. And most importantly, Blackbird Technologies went from being one of the most prolific patent trolls in the United States to shrinking its staff and filing many fewer cases.

We’re going to do it again. And we need your help.

Turning the Tables — A $100,000 Bounty for Prior Art  ..... '

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