The late Jim Croce famously sang
You don’t tug on Superman’s cape
You don’t spit into the wind
You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Jim
Cloudflare has another item for that list: “You don’t patent troll Cloudflare.” That should have been obvious to everyone after they essentially destroyed Blackbird Technologies when Blackbird tried filing a spurious patent suit against them. Cloudflare responded by offering a bounty for prior art not only on the patent Blackbird was asserting against them but for every patent in Blackbird’s portfolio.
Sadly, some people are slow learners. Another non-practicing entity (NPE), an outfit called Sable Networks, decided to try its luck and asserted patent infringement against Cloudflare on four of its patents. Cloudflare was not amused and has launched another bounty program for prior art on all of Sable’s patents.
You can read the details and a list of the patents on Cloudflare’s post about the suit. It’s too bad that other large companies—such as Cisco and Juniper—caved to Sable and bought them off. That’s what NPEs depend on: that it’s cheaper to settle than to fight. It takes a company like Cloudflare, or Newegg before them, to do what’s right and smash these trolls and the bridges they hide under to pieces. After a while the trolls learn that you don’t mess around with Jim.