Three years ago, I wrote about patent trolls and Cloudflare and compared filing frivolous patent suits against to CloudFlare to messing around with Jim despite the warning from the late Jim Croce. At that time, Cloudflare had already destroyed (literally) Blackbird Technologies, another patent troll, and were then being sued by Sable Networks who, apparently, hadn’t taken the Cloudflare response to Blackbird to heart.
Now, finally, that case has also come to an end. It didn’t end well for Sable Networks. Cloudflare used its usual strategy of offering a bounty for prior art on all of Sable Network’s patents—not just the ones being asserted against Cloudflare.
Despite the suit being filed in the Western District of Texas—a venue notorious for being friendly to patent holders—the jury took less than 2 hours to find not only that Cloudflare had not violated Sable’s patents but that the patents were invalid and should never have been granted.
Go read the story. It’s a feel good tale but it also underlines a not-so-good fact: lots (most) big companies such as Cisco, Juniper Networks, Checkpoint, Fortinet, and others just capitulate to these trolls rather than go to the expense of fighting them. It’s just cheaper. Sadly, this just encourages the trolls to go after other companies. Fortunately, they’re mostly too dumb to realize that you don’t mess around with Jim.