We are excited to announce another Project Jengo winner, and provide you with an important update on our fight against Sable Networks.

As a reminder, Project Jengo is Cloudflare’s efforts to flip the incentive structure that has encouraged the growth of patent trolls that seek to leverage overbroad and unpracticed patents to extract settlements from operating entities. We do this by refusing to settle patent cases brought against us by trolls, and instead, use a crowdsourced bounty to identify prior art that undermines the value of the troll’s patents, and not just the ones asserted against Cloudflare. This is the second iteration of Project Jengo, which is focused on a patent troll called Sable.

Even though the case against Sable has been active for over a year now, and we’ve already achieved some great results, we haven’t let up the pressure. We’re now also giving out Cloudflare T-shirts to new Project Jengo participants – all you need to do is submit prior art related to any of the Sable patents this year and the first 100 participants with a U.S. mailing address will receive a Cloudflare t-shirt.

We have already awarded $30,000 so far to winners of the Sable-focused Project Jengo. Last quarter, we awarded $10,000 to a former R&D engineer from Rennes, France who heard about Project Jengo through Hacker News. This round, we are excited to announce that we’ll be awarding Curtis Carter with $5,000!

In explaining why he participated in Project Jengo, Curtis said:

“As a maintainer/contributor for several open source projects (NuGetDefense being my main project), I'm always afraid some troll is going to attack one of my projects or a project I contribute to, and I may not be able to afford stopping it.”

That is why we started Project Jengo – to help support and protect innovators against malicious patent trolls. They hinder innovation of productive companies, and trade in fear as currency. As Curtis highlighted, the future is brighter without trolls:

“I think what you are doing is for the good of future generations, and I'm proud I got to participate even if I hadn't won anything.”

Developers and innovators should not work in fear that trolls will target them for frivolous settlements. The patent system was built to promote innovation, not destroy it.

Not only does Curtis maintain NuGetDefense (a known vulnerability scanner for the .Net NuGet ecosystem), he’s also an engineer at Tech Friends, Inc., a software development company that he claims is the best employer for software developers in Northeast Arkansas. Impressively, he is self-taught.

“This was the first time in a while that I dug into old research documents and patents. Honestly, the people who originally put this stuff together were often brilliant, and their work is a joy to read (even if it's a bit dry).”

As for his submission, Curtis Carter took on the challenge of finding prior art for United States Patent No. 8,085,775, an over broad patent that Sable owns and generally covers a mechanism for identifying, classifying, and controlling flows over a network.

Sable chose not to assert that patent against Cloudflare in our ongoing litigation. The prior art he found specifically addresses “methods, apparatuses and systems directed to a flow-based, traffic-classification-aware data collection and reporting system…” according to its abstract (US Patent No. 7,385,924). Furthermore, the prior art Curtis found pre-dates Sable’s patent by just over three years.

Curtis's discovery has the added benefit of teaching many concepts to the narrower ’593 patent that Sable is asserting in the lawsuit. The narrower patent specifically addresses a method for identifying and penalizing misbehaving flows in a network. Side note: the patent is so old that its background description references some ancient applications:

“With the advent of file sharing applications such as KaZaA, Gnutella, BearShare, and Winny, the amount of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic on the Internet has grown immensely in recent years.”

The prior art found by Curtis demonstrates TCP’s use of a sliding window scheme in which flow control is exercised over incoming flows. This is exactly the type of flow control both patents purport to cover. Furthermore, we were impressed with Curtis’ efforts to find prior art related to one of the narrower patents owned by Sable – well done, Mr. Carter!

As for what his discovery looks like, take a look at the first sentence of the patent’s abstract to get an idea.

Methods, apparatuses and systems directed to a flow-based, traffic-classification-aware data collection and reporting system that combine flow-based data collection technologies with enhanced traffic classification functionality to allow for analysis and reporting into aspects of network operations that prior art systems cannot provide.

If you haven’t won yet, don’t be discouraged. We have committed \$100,000 to this prior art search, so we still have \$65,000 to give out!

As part of our fight against Sable, we’ve been involved in a year-long process before the US Patent Office called Inter Partes Review (or “IPR”) with the goal of invalidating patents held by Sable Networks. You can check out our blog post from 2017 that outlines how the IPR process works. In our last blog post, we were pleased to announce that the Patent Office agreed to institute IPR on some of Sable’s patents. Today, we’re even happier to announce that we’ve officially killed off Sable’s ‘932 patent.

Once the Patent Office agrees to review the validity of a patent, the owner of the patent typically files a brief defending the validity of its patent (because if you own it you should think it’s valid, right?). But in this case, instead of explaining to the Patent Office why its ’932 patent is valid (or why Cloudflare is wrong), Sable simply decided to voluntarily cancel all claims of the patent. Since there is no claim left for the Patent Office to review, the IPR should be terminated soon, and we’ve effectively obtained the full relief requested!

This is a big win for anyone concerned with abuse of the patent system, including all the companies that Sable Networks previously attacked with this patent, including Dell, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper Networks, Aruba Networks, amongst others. Yes, as absurd as it sounds, this patent has been used by Sable Networks to help squeeze out settlements from numerous productive technology companies. This victory means that Sable has one less patent to try to leverage in its attempts to abuse the patent system.

As we mentioned in our February blog post, part of our goal with Project Jengo is to spread the word that targets of these trolls can and should fight back and win. That’s why we were thrilled to see a recent blog post from Coinbase announcing that the company is following Cloudflare’s lead when it comes to pushing back on patent trolls. Trolls count on easy targets to fund their operations through settlements, so it’s great news that a major company like Coinbase has made clear that it will refuse to capitulate and will instead fight back.

We could not have gotten to this point without the help of the many Project Jengo participants. We have received hundreds of prior art references on Sable’s ten patents, and we have used many of those references in our efforts to kill off the patents that Sable asserted against us.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in Project Jengo for supporting the broader community and helping us take down a patent troll. If you haven’t participated yet, please consider submitting to our prior art contest.

The classic children’s fairy tale The Three Billy Goats Gruff tells the story of three goats trying to cross a bridge to a field of yummy grass, despite the monstrous troll that lives underneath the bridge and threatens to eat them. To beat the troll, the goats played on his greed and proceeded across the bridge in order from smallest to largest – and holding the troll at bay each time with promises of a larger meal if he waited for the larger goat to follow. In the end, the troll passed on attacking the smaller goats and was left to do battle with the largest goat who was able to defeat the troll, toss him off the bridge, and watch him float downstream. The goats were then able to enjoy the yummy grass, troll-free. In our fight against Sable Networks (patent troll), we plan on being that third goat, and our recent wins suggest we might be on track to do just that.

We started Project Jengo 2 last year as a prior art search contest, so we could enlist your help in the battle against Sable Networks. We committed $100,000 in cash prizes to be shared by the winners who were successful in finding such prior art, and last quarter, we gave out $20,000 to three lucky winners. This quarter, we are excited to announce our second round winner who will take home $10,000! The winner submitted prior art related to the asserted ’431 patent.

We are happy to announce the winner for this round is Jean-Pierre Le Rouzic. Although Jean-Pierre is retired and living in Rennes, France, he decided to put his patent knowledge to work when he saw Project Jengo discussed on Hacker News. Jean-Pierre is a former telecommunications R&D engineer who wrote twelve patents in the 2000s that relate to online authentication and identity management. Impressively, he was one of the first users of Java at his company, and recalls using Java as early as 1996!

Jean-Pierre’s career experience certainly helped in his research – his Jengo submission was 24 pages and included a meticulously detailed claim chart. In particular, he addressed vulnerabilities in Sable’s extremely large scope for the ’431 patent addressing “micro-flow management.” You can read more detailed information about Jean-Pierre’s findings in the appendix to this blog post or all of the findings of Jean-Pierre and other submissions are available to anyone who may face a challenge from Sable’s claims here.

We enjoyed Jean-Pierre’s response to the good news:

I do not master enough English to express how happy I am, and how happy I am for Cloudflare if my work is useful. I find the idea of patent trolls hideous. The patent regulations should really be updated to enter the XXI century.

Jean-Pierre’s reasons for participating in Jengo were different from most other participants. As his current interest is in neurodegenerative diseases, specially ALS, and he said part of his motive stemmed from what he has seen in the medical industry:

The challenge faced by Cloudflare is close to my heart, because of its similarity to what is happening in the world of medical drugs. Cloudflare is facing an entity which is unreasonably stretching the meaning of their patent claims.

We could not agree more -- we think Sable is beyond unreasonable, which is why we intend to change the incentive structure that makes things so easy for them, and we are so grateful for Jean-Pierre’s support (and all the other Jengo participants).

Also, worth noting, we were excited to see that both he and one of his daughters is a current user of Cloudflare!

My blog (padiracinnovation.org) uses Cloudflare, and I am a very satisfied user. The online shop of one of my daughter’s also uses Cloudflare.

Last year, we announced that we were facing a challenge from a patent troll called Sable Networks that was trying to weaponize decades-old and unused patents against us. With your help through the relaunch of Project Jengo, we became determined to outsmart the troll.

One of the steps we are taking, as Ethan mentioned in our August blog post, is seeking to invalidate the four asserted patents in the lawsuit through a procedure with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (Patent Office) known as inter partes review (IPR). As we previously explained, IPR is a trial proceeding that lasts for one year, conducted before the Patent Office, to determine whether or not a patent (or some of its constituent claims) should be invalidated. Importantly, the IPR process is only instituted after a party files an extensive petition that is reviewed by a panel of three administrative patent judges -- who will only institute an IPR, if they believe a petitioner has a reasonable likelihood of succeeding in invalidating at least one claim from the challenged patent.

In December, after months of hard work and considerable attorney’s fees and expenses, we found out the efforts Ethan described last August had paid off -- the first two of our four IPR petitions were granted by the Patent Office! For each of the challenged patents -- the ’593 and the ’932 patents -- an IPR proceeding has been instituted on every single claim -- a total of 76 claims between the two patents. This is exceptional news for us, as the Patent Office has made a preliminary determination that we are likely to succeed on invalidating a vast majority of those claims, giving us a chance to invalidate those two patents in their entirety. This provides an independent path for defeating Sable’s lawsuit, because if the Patent Office declares a patent to be invalid -- meaning that patent never should have been issued in the first place -- the patent no longer exists, and we have effectively pushed the troll off the bridge. Now that we have two IPRs instituted, the Patent Office has one year from the date of institution to make their final decision on whether the challenged claims are valid or not.

And, by the way, it was pretty nice to see our diligence recognized:

“Moreover, the undisputed evidence here shows that [Cloudflare] acted diligently, filing its Petition only seven weeks after service of the complaint and well before preliminary infringement contentions were served.”

Decision Granting Institution of Inter Partes Review at p. 12 (IPR2021-00909) (Nov. 19, 2021)

But this was only half the battle. There are four Sable patents at issue in the litigation. For the ’919 and ’431 patents, we filed separate IPR petitions on all 38 claims from those two patents last year. In response to our petitions, Sable voluntarily canceled 34 out of 38 claims from its own patents, which says a lot about what they think about the quality of their decades-old patents. The Patent Office subsequently declined to institute IPR on the four remaining claims. Sable is now left with only 4 out of the 38 claims to pursue in the litigation, and those four claims are far removed from Cloudflare’s products and services.

We are happy to see some more press coverage on the fight against Sable Networks. More press means that more people become aware of this issue and can help put a stop to future patent trolls. Most trolls merely send threatening letters and hope they can get a quick settlement from their threats without having to see the light of day by going to court or to the Patent Office to defend their claims. We are just one entity (that has enlisted your help) fighting against a villainous patent troll -- but would it not be great to see other big companies fight back when they encounter their next troll?

• “Cloudflare Lands Tribunal Review of Data Transmission Patent” -- Bloomberg Law

• “PTAB To Eye Patent Cloudflare Offered 'Bounty' To Help Kill” -- Law 360

• “Recently, Cloudflare Inc. succeeded in convincing the PTAB to institute in IPR2021-00969 against a Sable Network, Inc.’s patent directed toward data flow” -- JD Supra

We could not have gotten to this point without the help of the many Project Jengo participants. We have received hundreds of prior art references on Sable’s ten patents, and we have used many of those references to help kill off the four patents that Sable asserted against us. While we have made some great progress together, we cannot let our guard down now. We will continue to fight vigorously, but just as in the Three Billy Goats Gruff, we need your support to take down a ravenous troll. Please consider submitting to our prior art contest, and please share the contest with co-workers, family and friends. On behalf of the Cloudflare community, thanks to everyone who has participated so far!

The ’431 patent leveraged by Sable is titled “Micro-Flow Management” and concerns Internet switching technology for network service providers. The patent claims priority all the way back to April 19, 2000. The ’431 patent discloses a router that puts a label on packets for a given “microflow,” and forwards all the packets in that same microflow based on the label.

Our first blog post about Sable’s claims explained that the ’431 patent assertions were so broad, they could stretch to possibly even the “conventional routers” from the 2000s that routed each packet independently.

Thankfully, Jean-Pierre noted some similarities between the asserted ’431 patent and the patent he tracked down. US Patent No. 7,406,098 was first publicly available as early as 1999. The ’098 patent is related to the allocation of communication resources of a single node among a multitude of subscribers. In Jean-Pierre’s words, both the asserted patent and the ’098 patent concern “the need to allocate switched packets resources to a single communication among many.”

The first claim in ’431 is for “a method for managing data traffic through a network”, while the first claim in the ’098 is for “a method of allocating a resource in a communication system” -- both of which Jean-Pierre found to read quite similar. As he described, in both cases there is a need to “allocate Internet (switched packets) resources to a single communication among many, this allocation is based on a classification.” Ultimately, the ’098 patent is noteworthy in that it demonstrates the obviousness of what Sable claims the ’431 patent covers. People of skill in the art (like the Qualcomm inventors from the ’098 patent), long before the ’431 patent, knew how to manage the flow of data using queues.

Take a look at the snapshot from the claim chart Jean-Pierre submitted:

The language in Claim 1 of the ’431 patent deals with the “delegating” of “microflows”, while Claim 14 of the ’098 patent deals with the “assigning” of “application flows”. We have hardly scraped the surface here, as there are plenty of other similarities between the two patents -- take a look for yourselves!

We are grateful for Jean-Pierre’s participation in Project Jengo, and we are looking forward to receiving more prior art as we continue to fight Sable Networks!

This past April we announced the revival of Project Jengo in response to a patent troll called Sable Networks that sued Cloudflare even though our technology and products are nothing like what’s described in Sable’s patents. This is only one part of Sable’s larger campaign against innovative technology companies — Sable sued five other technology companies earlier this year, and had sued seven other technology companies under the same patents last year.

Just as we have done in the past, we decided to fight back rather than feed the troll — which would only make it stronger. You see, unlike Cloudflare and other operating companies that were sued, Sable Networks isn’t in the business of providing products and services to the market. Rather, it exists to extract settlements out of productive companies that are creating value to the society.

Project Jengo is a prior art search contest where we ask the Cloudflare community for help in finding evidence (“prior art”) that shows Sable’s patents are invalid because they claim something that was already known at the time the patent application was filed. We committed $100,000 in cash prizes to be shared by the winners who were successful in finding such prior art.

The first chapter of this contest has now ended, and we received almost 400 prior art references on Sable’s ten patents. And over 80% of those references were submitted to kill off the four patents that Sable asserted against us. Let me first say thank you to everyone who submitted these! Here at Cloudflare, we are constantly energized and motivated by the support from our community, and we are heartened by our community’s participation in Project Jengo.

We reviewed every eligible submission and scored them based on the strength of the prior art reference(s), difficulty, the story provided by the entrant, and the clarity and thoroughness of the explanation. Today, we are announcing the selection of three great submissions as cash prize winners in this round. The first winner will receive \$10,000, and the other two will each receive \$5,000.

As you’ll recall, Sable is using a set of patents from the early 2000’s related to a flow-based router called Apeiro, which was never widely adopted and eventually failed in the marketplace over a decade ago. Sable is now stretching those patents way beyond what they were meant to cover. Sable’s flawed reading of these patents extends infringement to basic routing and switching functionality known long before any alleged invention date, including “conventional routers” from the 2000s that routed each packet independently without any regard to flows. The way Sable is interpreting its patents so broadly and the fact that Sable has gone after numerous technology companies selling a wide range of different products worry us — by its current standard, Sable could target anyone using a router, and that would include anyone with a WiFi router in their home. You can help stop this madness by participating in this contest and finding prior art on any of Sable’s ten patents that we’ve identified — not just on the four patents that Sable asserted against us.

The contest is ongoing, and we still have $80,000 to give out. The sooner you send us quality prior-art references, the more helpful they will be in invalidating Sable’s patents, so please make your submissions here as soon as possible. Already made a submission, but you aren’t one of the three winners today? It isn’t over — we will consider your submission again when we announce our next round of winners in November (and you can, of course, also enter a new and better submission). We have many more rounds to go as long as Sable’s case is pending against us, which means earlier submissions benefit from being considered in multiple rounds of this contest, so please don’t delay and make your submission now.

If this were a boxing match, then we would still be in the first round, sparring in the ring, with Sable up against the ropes. So jump in, win some cash, and help us KO Sable Networks.

This document is one of the 17 prior-art references sent to us by Matthew M. We are highlighting the Internet Engineering Task Force (“IETF”) Request for Comments (“RFC”) 2702. An RFC is something like a step in an industry-wide brainstorming session where an idea or ideas are floated to others in the industry with the aim of building something great everyone can use. The RFC found by Matthew M. is a good example of the process in which engineers from MCI Worldcom are building on the work of engineers from companies like Cisco, IBM, Juniper, and Ascend. All of these companies were well aware of the concepts Sable is now trying to claim its patents cover, including “micro-flows,” label-switched paths, and the basic concept of choosing a path through the network based on QoS information in a packet. The IETF’s records of these industry-wide brainstorming sessions are great evidence of Sable’s overreaching interpretations of its patents.

As for the winner, Matthew has a degree in Computer Networking & Cybersecurity, and manages a small team of developers at a FinTech company. Like most Project Jengo participants, he wasn’t motivated solely by the money. He told us, “I quickly learned just how vague you can make a patent and it’s quite disgusting.” We agree! Matthew shared that he thinks patent trolls “provide no value to society and only exist to strip true business men and women of their hard-earned craft.” He underscored this point when we reached out to congratulate him on the $10,000 prize:

I can’t stand blockers to true American ingenuity and patent trolls stand to destroy hard-earned work using minuscule technicalities in our broken justice system. I am happy to do my part in helping Cloudflare get the upper hand in this lawsuit and hopefully flip it on its head and take down Sable Networks altogether.

Matthew also highlighted the tremendous damage that patent trolls can do to companies and innovation:

I think patent trolls are one of the biggest stiflers of innovation. Companies like Cloudflare could be spending all their time working on new products that provide value but instead, they must allocate resources to fight off cowardly lawsuits like this one.

This submission will be put to good use in our fight against Sable, and we were happy to award Matthew with his prize money. We smiled when Matthew exclaimed he was “speechless” after finding out that he won. Congratulations, Matthew!

This winning submission also included an RFC from the IETF. These records from the important work of the IETF members ensure Sable won’t be able to take credit for things it simply didn’t invent. The neat thing about RFC 1953 is that the submitter connected it with actual products from companies called Ipsilon Networks, Inc. and Ascend Communications. There appear to be similarities between those products and the technology Sable is now claiming to have made, like the inventions of the ’919 patent. The problem for Sable is that Ipsilon and Ascend appear to have done it first! Ipsilon and Ascend were acquired by other companies so finding details about their innovative products and technology may be difficult, but we’re going to try. It may be that the submitter or someone reading this post can help.

The submission came from Pedro S., who heard about Project Jengo on the Security Now podcast. Pedro has spent 20 years in various technical roles, including a position at Ascend Communications in the 1990’s where he became familiar with their products. Today he is working at a cybersecurity company in the Bay Area. When asked why he chose to participate, he bluntly responded with “I hate patent trolls — I also enjoyed the trip down memory lane as some of the stuff I submitted comes from my days at Lucent.” We are happy to hear he enjoyed participating in the fight! We’re enjoying it too, thanks to the participation of folks like Pedro.

Congratulations, Pedro!

This submission pointed us to U.S. Patent No. 7,107,356 (“’356 patent”) for its relevance to Sable’s U.S. Patent No. 7,630,358 (Mechanism for implementing multiple logical routers within a single physical router). The ’358 patent hasn’t been asserted against Cloudflare (at least not yet), and this is a good example of the enthusiasm of our community to comprehensively search for prior art relevant to both Sable’s currently asserted patents and those it may use to sue other companies later down the road. The ’356 patent found by our final winner in this round of Project Jengo carefully describes the guts of a router, and this relatively straight-forward patent makes short work of Sable’s overreaching claims of invention. Rest assured, if Sable is looking to assert the ’358 patent against Cloudflare or some other company down the road, our community is well-prepared to meet the challenge.

The submission comes from Stephen F., a web developer at a managed IT company working on custom websites. When his IT coworker shared the Project Jengo announcement in the office chat, he decided to participate. Stephen has never done prior art search before, but he was eager to participate and spent an entire day looking for prior art:

I'm submitting because I love Cloudflare and how it has made my life easier as a web developer … I've had to learn a lot more about routing and patent law today, and spent several hours looking at documents, scholarly journals, etc.

Even though this was his first time researching something like this, he understood the importance of beating Sable Networks:

I stand firmly against patent trolls like Sable, and decided to spend my day looking into prior art for the sake of Cloudflare's continued success.

Not only did Stephen understand the importance of beating Sable, he also understood the challenges in doing a prior art search, but that didn’t stop him! We admire his tenacity and are impressed with his efforts, and some of the challenges he had to overcome during his search:

I needed to find where the patents could have been stolen/read from each other and what the offending points of the patents would be. During my research I learned a LOT about patent law, which was pretty challenging!

Congratulations, Stephen!

We received almost 400 prior art references thus far, and as promised we are making them public. As a reminder, we are collecting prior art on any of the patents owned by Sable, not just the ones asserted against Cloudflare. You can go to the webpage we’ve set up to see them, and we hope this information is of use to anyone who is sued by Sable down the road.

Project Jengo continues to capture the attention of tech media. It’s important to us to keep the narrative alive — the more awareness we can spread about the true harm of patent trolls, the more likely we are to inspire other well-resourced companies to refuse to capitulate. If we do this together, we’re far more likely to set a new standard, and ultimately, find the antidote to the ever-growing number of patent trolls that plague productive companies. If we enter the battle alone we are strong, but if we fight together we are unstoppable! Here’s what we’ve seen since our initial blog post was published (news outlets appear to be just as enthusiastic as we are!):

• “Cloudflare offers $100,000 for prior art to nuke networking patents a troll has accused it of ripping off,” – The Register

• “Instead of just saying it wouldn't settle, Cloudflare set out to completely destroy the patent troll who sued it, ” – Techdirt

• “The idea is to deal a big enough blow to Sable that not only is its case against Cloudflare hobbled but also future cases against other entities.” – Techcrunch

It has been five months since Sable Networks sued us in Waco, Texas, and we want to share a quick update on the litigation front. Since then, we have filed four petitions with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for inter partes review (“IPR”), seeking to invalidate the four asserted patents. As we previously explained, IPR is a procedure for challenging the validity of a patent before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and it is supposed to be faster and cheaper than litigating before a U.S. district court. Of course, faster and cheaper are relative — it still takes about 18 months to invalidate a patent using this procedure, and the filing fees alone for the four petitions were over $200,000. It is easy to see how the exorbitant cost involved in patent litigation allows patent trolls to flourish and why so many companies are willing to quickly settle.

Aside from the IPRs, our litigation is moving forward in district court. Sable served us with its preliminary infringement contentions, which are supposed to explain why it believes we infringe its four asserted patents, and we will be serving our preliminary invalidity contentions to Sable soon.

Sable went after six companies earlier this year, and three of them have already settled and dropped out of the fight. We will continue to fight against Sable, and we hope to see our peers continue fighting against this patent troll with us. Please stay tuned for our next update in three months!

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 over broad 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.

Sable Networks and its lawsuit fit neatly within the same troubling trends we were trying to address the first time we launched Project Jengo. Sable is taking ancient, 20-year-old patents and trying to stretch those patents light years beyond what they were meant to cover. It has already sued over a dozen technology companies targeting a wide range of different products and services, and by extending its claims to a company like Cloudflare suggests it may next try to stretch its claims to people that merely use routers … namely, anyone that uses the Internet.

We think Sable’s choice to bring these lawsuits on such a tenuous basis should come with some risk related to the underlying merits of its patents and its arguments, so we are sponsoring another prior-art contest seeking submissions to identify prior art for all of Sable’s active patents. We are seeking the help of the Cloudflare community to identify prior art — i.e., evidence that the patented technology was already in use or known before the patent application was filed — that can be used to invalidate Sable’s patents. And we will make it worth your while, by offering $100,000 to be shared by the winners who are successful in finding such prior art.

Again this time, we are committing $100,000 to be split among entrants who provide what we determine to be the most useful prior-art references that can be used in challenging the validity of Sable’s patents. You can submit prior-art references as long as Sable’s case is pending against us (Sable Networks, Inc. v. Cloudflare, Inc., No. 6:21-cv-00261-ADA (W.D. Tex.)), which means until Sable drops the case fully (and with prejudice — meaning Sable can’t re-file later), there’s a settlement, or the case has been resolved by the court and all appeal rights are exhausted.

Every three months for two years or until the case ends, whichever comes first, we will select winners from the submissions to date, and give out a portion of the $100,000 as awards. Once the case ends, we will select final winners from all submissions and award the remaining funds. We will also make all relevant submissions available to the public.

Here are the four Sable patents asserted against us:

And here are the six remaining Sable patents:

In addition to helping with our case, we hope that making prior art public on all of Sable’s patents will provide a head start and decrease the costs for others who want to fight back against Sable’s patent trolling. The significant decrease we saw in Blackbird’s staff and filings after publishing prior art on Blackbird’s patents suggests this approach can be an effective way to undermine the threat posed by those patents.

Last time, we received 275 submissions from 155 different people on 49 of the Blackbird patents. In the end, we made payments to 18 participants. We were heartened by how many members of the Cloudflare community not only participated in this effort, but expressed great gusto and appreciation for the opportunity to be involved:

Over the years I've been disappointed and angered by a number of patent cases where I feel that the patent system has been abused by so-called ‘patent trolls’ in order to stifle innovation and profit from litigation. With Jengo in particular, I was a fan of what Cloudflare had done previously with Universal SSL. When the opportunity arose to potentially make a difference with a real patent troll case, I was happy to try and help.— Adam, Security Engineer

I'm pretty excited, I've never won a single thing in my life before. And to do it in service of taking down evil patent trolls? This is one of the best days of my life, no joke. I submitted because software patents are garbage and clearly designed to extort money from productive innovators for vague and obvious claims. Also, I was homeless at the time I submitted and was spending all day at the library anyway.— Garrett, San Francisco

To understand why we are asking again for your help fighting back, it’s worth taking a closer look at this case and the fundamental problems it represents.

The patents at issue in this case started with Caspian Networks, a company that tried to commercialize what it called a “flow-based router” in the early 2000s. Caspian was originally founded as Packetcom in 1998, and revealed to the public its flow-based router named Apeiro in 2003. A press story from that time explained that Apeiro routers worked like traditional routers already in existence, but with additional memory and logic for handling packets from the same “flow.” A 2003 slide deck from Caspian distinguished its “flow-based” router from the already existing conventional routers in the following way:

Despite its attempts to tout the benefits of its router, Caspian went out of business in 2006.

That’s when Sable Networks, the company that is suing Cloudflare, enters the picture. Though it doesn’t appear to be much of an entrance. As best we can tell, Sable briefly picked up where Caspian left off and tried to commercialize Caspian’s flow-based routing technology. Sable was equally unsuccessful in doing so, and the last activity of any sort that we could find was from 2011. After a long period of apparent inactivity, Sable’s focus shifted last year to trying to extract money by filing lawsuits through broad application of patents filed on Caspian’s flow-based router technology twenty years ago. In other words, Sable became a patent troll.

In the first round of litigation, Sable filed, and later promptly settled, eight lawsuits asserting infringement of Sable’s router patents. The defendants in those cases (including Cisco and Juniper Networks) provide a range of Internet services, but they all at least manufacture and sell network equipment.

Interestingly, all of those cases were settled just before Sable would have had to do two things that would have actually put its legal claims to the test: (1) respond to an administrative proceeding before the US Patent & Trademark Office (“USPTO”) challenging the validity of its patents; and (2) attend a hearing before the district court where the judge would have determined the proper interpretation and scope of the patent claims. So Sable filed cookie-cutter cases against eight defendants, waited for the defendants to respond, then settled the cases before meaningfully litigating its claims or facing a binding court or administrative ruling, which may have addressed, or likely undermined, Sable’s overly-broad assertion of those patents.

Shortly after settling the original eight cases earlier this year, Sable turned around and filed six new lawsuits against a new batch of technology companies, this time including Cloudflare. Unlike the earlier named defendants, Cloudflare is not in the business of making or selling routers or switches. Sable’s infringement claim therefore is not a close one, and now it’s picked a defendant that is eager to fight back.

This case is a good illustration of how patent trolls operate. All four patents asserted by Sable against Cloudflare were filed between 2000 and 2004, when dial-up Internet access was still common, and are based on Caspian’s “flow-based routing” technology, which is nothing like the technology Cloudflare’s products and services employ. To take one example, one of the patents Sable asserts is U.S. Patent No. 6,954,431, entitled “Micro-Flow Management.” This patent is from April 19, 2000 — almost exactly 21 years ago. Just like Caspian’s Apeiro routers from 2003, the ’431 patent discloses a router that puts a label on the packets for a given flow, and forwards all the packets in that same flow based on the label:

’431 Patent, Fig. 3A‌‌

It claims to teach a “[n]ew switching technology [that] relies upon state information for providing a previously unavailable degree of quality of service” — presumably, Caspian’s flow-based routing technology featured in its 2003 Apeiro, which the market rejected over a decade ago.

Sable is now trying to stretch the patents way beyond what they were ever meant to cover. Many of Sable’s infringement claims appear to extend to basic routing and switching functionality known long before any alleged invention date. For the ’431 patent, Sable’s interpretation of the patent appears to stretch the scope so broadly as to cover any kind of packet processing, possibly even the “conventional routers” from the 2000s that routed each packet independently.

Having made this leap, Sable has demonstrated an intent to apply its patents far afield. It’s now a small step for Sable to assert claims against any person or business using a firewall or even a router. On the basis of its logic, any person using a WiFi router in their home may be in Sable’s cross-hairs. And Sable has already claimed that its patents cover firewalls — including firewall software and firewall devices. Again, its wildly broad interpretation threatens not just large companies; anyone trying to protect their networks from outside threats is potentially at risk.

If you think you or your small business are safe because you haven’t really done anything wrong, and no court would ever hold you liable, then you haven’t been paying attention to the current state of patent litigation where small businesses are sued for using copy machines. Without some of us fighting back, the incentives for patent trolls won’t change.

Patent trolls like Sable proliferate because of a distorted incentive structure fuelled by the astronomical costs associated with defending against even bogus patent claims. According to the 2019 Report of the Economic Survey by the American Intellectual Property Law Association, the median litigation cost for defending claims of patent infringement brought by a non-practicing entity through trial and appeal was staggering \$4,500,000 for big cases (i.e., cases with more than \$25 million at risk). Even for small cases that had less than $1 million at stake, the median defense cost was \$750,000.

Knowing that most defendants will settle at a percentage of their expected litigation costs long before infringement claims see the inside of a courtroom, patent trolls see only upside from each additional lawsuit they file. Their business model is built around filing as many lawsuits as possible regardless of the strength of their legal claims, because they know most defendants will pay to settle before the merits of their case are put to the test. They therefore take vague technology patents issued years ago and apply them as broadly as imaginable to new technologies and new companies. Most of these trolls are non-practicing entities who don’t have their own products in the marketplace but merely exist to extract a tax on other companies.

After declining in numbers for a few years, patent lawsuits were up last year about 12% over 2019, and increased activity by non-practicing entities buying patents suggested even further growth among such lawsuits in the future. The Electronic Frontier Foundation observed similar increases in patent troll filings in 2020, highlighted a case where one patent troll decided that the middle of a pandemic was a good time to sue a company that makes COVID-19 tests, and noted that “some patent owners actually saw the rise of the COVID-19 health emergency as a business opportunity.” This trend is showing no signs of slowing down — according to a recent report, there was a 43.3% increase in patent litigation in Q1 of 2021 compared to the same period a year ago, and non-practicing entities had their busiest Q1 since 2015, fuelled by the litigation finance industry that is flush with capital.

To reaffirm what we’ve always said: Cloudflare is a strong supporter of the patent system. The 160+ patents we’ve been issued to date give us the ability to run our business with confidence by marketing and providing our services around the world, innovating on our existing products, and developing new products. But patent trolls live in a world where they allege fictional potential uses of their patents without having to make the investment to hire and pay employees or identify and satisfy the demands of the marketplace. Project Jengo is intended to address this distorted incentive structure by imposing real costs on the filing of meritless patent lawsuits. With your help, we can again send the message that by filing the wrong case, patent trolls risk losing not just a single lawsuit but a lot more.

We hope you’re all rested and ready to begin again the hunt for prior art!