Cloudflare has declared war against the Blackbird patent troll. $ 50k reward for help

Patent trolls remain a headache for American IT companies. Another target of the attack of professional lawyers armed with intellectual property was the well-known company Cloudflare, which provides CDN services, information security, DNS services and reverse proxy for millions of sites on the Internet. On March 20, 2017, the Blackbird Tech LLC patent troll sued the company for a patent infringement.

Non-Practicing Entities (NPE) companies are called patents in the jargon. They are not engaged in production activities, but only are active in the courts.

“This lawsuit will give us inconvenience. He takes time, distracts us from work and will cost money. Patent trolls like Blackbird Technologies ( @bbird_tech ) exist to create such troubles, so companies give money just to leave, ” writes the corporate blog Cloudflare.
')
Claims for violation of ridiculous patents are received by many companies, and in most cases they prefer to simply pay off a small amount so as not to fool their heads, and the patent troll goes further down the list. To the credit of Cloudflare, she did not go along the beaten track, but instead declared war on the patent troll . Cloudflare believes this is an important thing, because Blackbird is a dangerous specimen of the “new breed” of patent trolls.

In this case, the claim filed US patent No. 6453335 , the application for which was filed in 1998. It describes the data link monitoring system and the introduction of error pages if the data transfer rate falls below a certain level. This patent has nothing to do with the activities of Cloudflare. The company emphasizes that its innovative content delivery system works differently and is itself protected by 150 patents, but this is not so important. Patent trolls often file irrelevant patents - that’s why they are trolls. This does not prevent them from earning their money.

As in most other similar claims, the troll patent is doubtful and has a chance of being revoked. If we consider it in a broad sense - as a description of the electronic communications system, which are monitored and modified depending on certain parameters - then it can be applied to the Cloudflare system, as if pulling an owl on a globe. But in this case, this patent should be revoked, because by 1998 such a system was not an innovation. Filtration programs with similar functions were on the market long before patent No. 6453335.

There is nothing surprising. Blackbird Technologies does not protect the interests of the inventor and is not engaged in production activities. This is a patent troll whose task is simply to get money.

It is important that Blackbird Technologies is a "new and especially dangerous breed" of trolls. Cloudflare compares this breed with an artificially bred dinosaur breed from the last “Jurassic Park”, where the genes of tyrannosaurs and velociraptor were joined. The result was a very dangerous hybrid.


Hybrid of tyrannosaurs and velociraptor

The fact is that Blackbird Technologies has united a law firm and an owner of intellectual property into one company. Due to this, it saves on costs and can file a large number of lawsuits at practically no additional cost. This optimization was made specifically for more effective trolling of companies.


The founders of Blackbird Technologies Wendy Verlander ( Twitter , LinkedIn ) and Chris Freeman ( LinkedIn ) three years ago left their former employers who specialized, among other things ... in protecting customers from patent trolls

Cloudflare does not intend to give in and will seek the complete revocation of this and other Blackbird Technologies patents. In his blog, the company explains the tactics of further action. The company intends to act in three areas:

1. Resolute struggle in this lawsuit.
2. Reward up to $ 50,000 for the crowdsourcing of prior art technologies that will help revoke Blackbird Technologies patents. We are talking about all 37 patents and patent applications .
3. Contact professional associations with a complaint against Blackbird Technologies and its lawyers who violate professional code and ethical behavior.

Unfortunately, we have to admit that the problem of patent trolls in the United States cannot be solved, despite the efforts of legislators and IT companies. The revolutionary law “The Innovation Act of 2013” was supposed to put an end to trolls forever. On December 5, 2013, it was adopted by the lower house of the US parliament , but due to the opposition of the lobby from the legal industry, the pharmaceutical industry and some other lobbyists, this most important law has not yet reached the Senate.

According to some estimates, over the past ten years, the number of patent lawsuits has increased more than six times, and about 70% of them are initiated by patent trolls. Over the past year, these claims have caused companies to damage about $ 30 billion in direct costs, and direct costs are only the tip of the iceberg, because the actual damage from the loss of market capitalization and business derogation can be several times greater.

Maybe thanks to the decisive actions of Cloudflare in the world will be one less patent troll. We wish them success in the fight against unscrupulous lawyers, who previously defended companies from patent trolls, and have now gone over to the other side.