To underscore the point, it noted that while patent infringement lawsuits jumped 16% nationwide in the first six months of last year, the number of new disputes in Texas soared 96%. Though in 2017, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that patent holders suing corporations can’t seek out a friendly court - their venue of choice was long the Eastern District of Texas, where 2,500 cases were brought in 2015 alone, 95% of them initiated by outfits like Sable - business remains brisk in Texas, where legal teams bring in a lot of money and often successfully cast major corporations to local jurors as villainous.Ī report in the Houston Chronicle last year noted that businesses and individuals filed 747 patent complaints in Texas during the first six months of 2020 - double the number from a year earlier and twice as many as any other state. The reality is that most companies see infringement cases by nonpracticing entities like Sable as a nuisance to be quickly resolved because they are a distraction and because the expense of fighting is often equal to or even more than the cost of settling. A quick search shows that Sable has also sued the cybersecurity business Fortinet, the data platform Splunk, and networking giants Juniper Networks and Cisco Systems, among roughly a dozen other companies.Įight of those cases - including with Juniper and Cisco - have already settled. Indeed, Cloudflare is not the only company to attract Sable’s attention.
We want to put entire patent portfolio under scrutiny.” With Cloudflare even stronger today, the company is even better positioned to “ force to define their claims and stand on their claims in a way that leaves something behind for other folks, particularly smaller companies that may come behind us. “Blackbird came along when we had a bit more stability,” he notes. “We feel fortunate that we didn’t run into one of these cases earlier in our history, where it might have really taken us off our path,” Kramer tells TechCrunch. 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. This morning, after revealing the lawsuit publicly, it invited the engineering community to again “ turn the tables” on patent trolls by inviting them to participate in a crowdsourced effort to find evidence of prior art to invalidate the “ancient, 20-year-old patents” that Cloudlflare says that Sable is “trying to stretch … light-years beyond what they were meant to cover.”Ĭloudflare is also offering a $100,000 bounty to be split among entrants who provide the most useful prior-art references that can be used in challenging the validity of all of Sable’s patents, not just those being asserted against Cloudflare. Unsurprisingly, Cloudflare isn’t going to take this newest action lying down. Yet last month, Cloudflare was sued yet again, this time by Sable Networks, a “company that doesn’t appear to have operated a real business in nearly 10 years - relying on patents that don’t come close to the nature of our business or the services we provide,” says Doug Kramer, general counsel of Cloudflare. One might surmise that given the stink that Cloudflare raised, other patent trolls might choose an easier target. The hunted becomes the hunter: How Cloudflare’s fight with a ‘patent troll’ could alter the game
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