Cloudflare is continuing its crusade against patent trolls, defeating Sable and forcing it to free its patents by dedicating them to the public.

Cloudflare is one of the few companies that welcomes fights with patent trolls, even setting up Project Jango as a way of incentivizing users to help it fight such companies. Its latest legal battle was with Sable, a patent troll that sued Cloudflare in 2021 and tried to make the case that it was infringing multiple of Sable’s patents.

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Cloudflare immediately tapped into Project Jango, rewarding users who help it find “prior art,” or applications of the tech covered by Sable’s patents in use before Sable’s patents went into effect. Thanks in no small part to this effort, by the time the case went to trial, there was only one remaining claim against a single patent—down from the 100 claims against four patents when Sable initially sued Cloudflare.

The Challenges Cloudflare Faced

One of the biggest challenges Cloudflare faced was not the merits of the case, but explaining very technical terms to a non-technical jury, as the company explains.

To defeat Sable’s claim of infringement we needed to explain to the jury — in clear and understandable terms — why what Cloudflare does is different from what was covered by claim 25 of Sable’s remaining patent, U.S. Patent No. 7,012,919 (the ’919 patent). To do this, we enlisted the help of one of our talented Cloudflare engineers, Eric Reeves, as well as Dr. Paul Min, Senior Professor of Electrical & Systems Engineering at Washington University, an expert in the field of computer networking. Eric and Dr. Min helped us explain to the jury the multiple reasons we didn’t infringe.

While Sable tried its best to convince the jury otherwise, Cloudflare’s experts were able to clearly demonstrate how the CDN provider’s tech was a unique home-grown invention, and not a ripoff of Sable’s patent.

While Sable’s technical expert tried his hardest to convince the jury that various software and hardware components of Cloudflare’s servers constitute “line cards,” his explanations defied credibility. The simple fact is that Cloudflare’s servers do not have line cards.

Ultimately, the jury understood, returning a verdict that Cloudflare does not infringe claim 25 of the ‘919 patent.

Going Further to Invalidate Sable’s Claim

Cloudflare wasn’t happy with just winning the infringement claim. Instead,the company wanted to go further and invalidate the claim altogether, despite the challenge in doing so.

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.

To do this, we again relied on our technical expert, Dr. Min, to explain how two prior art references, U.S. Patent No. 6,584,071 (Kodialam) and U.S. Patent No. 6,680,933 (Cheeseman) together render claim 25 of the ’919 patent obvious. Kodialam and Cheeseman are patents from Nortel Networks and Lucent relating to router technology developed in the late 1990s. Both are prior art to the ’919 patent (i.e., they pre-date the priority date of the ’919 patent), and when considered together by a person skilled in the area of computer engineering and computer networking technology, they rendered obvious the so-called invention of claim 25.

Ultimately, Cloudfare’s efforts paid off, with a jury agreeing that Sable’s claim was invalid.

The Repercussions for Sable

The case ended up being a total loss for Sable on all counts. Throughout the case, it was apparent that Sable was motivated strictly by trying to achieve an easy payday, which it was denied. Even more fitting, Sable ended up paying Cloudflare, as well as giving up any possibility of weaponizing its patents again.

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.

Why Cloudflare Deserves An Award

Patent trolls are the bane of the tech industry’s existence. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with a company aggressively defending its intellectual property when it puts in the time and money to develop a technology, or purchases a tech and its patents, and goes on to use them.

In the case of patent trolls, however, these are companies that file vague, overly-broad patents to cover any number of concepts that may one day be used by some company. Or a patent troll will purchase a promising patent from an inventor. In both cases, however, the patent troll has no intention of developing any technology that may be covered by the patent. Their sole goal is to wait for another company to develop such tech and then shake them down for money.

Patent trolls are the worst of the worst, artificially inflating the cost of developing tech with their greedy shakedowns and lawsuits.

Cloudflare, with its long history of relentlessly going after paten trolls, deserves an award.