Cloudflare beats patent troll so badly it basically gives up

Networking giant pockets $225K, foe promises to stop suing and abandons IP

Cloudflare on Thursday celebrated a victory over Sable Networks, which the former described as a "patent troll."

That’s a term for an individual or organization that exists solely to makes patent infringement claims in the hope of winning a settlement from defendants concerned about costly patent litigation.

"Sable sued Cloudflare back in March 2021," wrote Emily Terrell and Patrick Nemeroff, respectively Cloudflare’s senior counsel for litigation and senior associate general counsel, in a write-up Wednesday.

"Sable is a patent troll. It doesn’t make, develop, innovate, or sell anything. Sable IP is merely a shell entity formed to monetize (make money from) an ancient patent portfolio acquired by Sable Networks from Caspian Networks in 2006."

Patent trolls have vexed the technology industry for years, sometimes even drawing regulatory responses as happened over a decade ago when opportunistic litigants focused on patents pertinent to the emerging smartphone market. The Obama administration responded by issuing a set of executive actions to curb abuses.

Lately, these patent profiteers have targeted the open source community. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Linux Foundation last month strengthened ties with United Patents, a company focused on defending against predatory patent claims.

Five other companies that we know of sued by Sable – Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks – settled out of court. Splunk, meanwhile, fought back and managed last year to convince Sable to dismiss its claim against the operation prior to its takeover by, funnily enough, Cisco.

Internet services giant Cloudflare has notched up an even greater victory. Facing an initial infringement lawsuit regarding around a hundred claims related to four patents, the corporation ended up having to deal with just a single patent violation claim.

In February, Cloudflare prevailed when a Texas jury found it did not infringe Sable's "micro-flow label switching" patent.

The biz both convinced the jury that it did not use the "micro-flow" technology described in the US patent 7,012,919 and that the patent was invalid because of prior art.

The existence of two earlier US patents, 6,584,071 and 6,680,933 for router technology developed by Nortel Networks and Lucent in the 1990s convinced the jury that Sable's '919 patent should never have been granted.

The matter also saw Sable pledge not to pursue further actions of this sort.

"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," said Terrell and Nemeroff.

The agreement means that Sable will tell the US Patent and Trademark Office that it is abandoning its patent rights and no further claims based on those patents will be possible.

The Register called Sable’s listed phone number, and it is no longer in service. The company's website is unresponsive and an attorney for the firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Terrell and Nemeroff said that prior art submissions for the Sable case related to Project Jengo, a crowd-sourced patent invalidation initiative, will be accepted until November 2, 2024. At some point thereafter, Cloudflare, which has already given out $70,000 in awards for the case, will select final award winners.

"We're proud of our work fighting patent trolls and believe that the outcome in this case sends a strong message that Cloudflare will fight back against meritless patent cases and we will win," a spokesperson for Cloudflare told The Register. ®