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Cloudflare Declares War On a Patent Troll With a $50,000 Bounty (fortune.com)
Internet security company Cloudflare has declared war on a company called Blackbird that consists of a group of lawyers who file patent lawsuits against tech and retail firms. In a blog post titled "Standing Up to a Dangerous New Breed of Patent Troll," Cloudflare called Blackbird's business model destruction and unethical, and announced a $50,000 bounty to anyone who would help invalidate Blackbird's patents. Fortune reports: "There's no social value here. There's no support for a maligned inventor. There's no competing business or product. There's no validation of an incentive structure that supports innovation. This is a shakedown where a patent troll, Blackbird Tech, creates as much nuisance as it can so its attorney-principals can try to grab some cash. Cloudflare does not intend to play along," said the blog post. While patent trolling has been around for years -- and is a particular bug bear of the tech industry -- Cloudflare says Blackbird's model of trolling involves a new and unethical twist. Specifically, the company says Blackbird's lawyer-executives are violating their professional obligations by buying the claims of potential clients and engaging in questionable fee-splitting arrangements. Here is how Cloudflare, which says it is filing complaints with the state bars of Massachusetts and Illinois, explains it: "Blackbird's 'new model' seems to be only that its operations set out to distort the traditional Attorney-Client relationship. Blackbird's website makes a direct pitch of its legal services to recruit clients with potential claims and then, instead of taking them on as a client, purchases their claims and provides additional consideration that likely gives the client an ongoing interest in the resulting litigation. In doing so, Blackbird is flouting its ethical obligations meant to protect clients and distorting the judicial process by obfuscating and limiting potential counterclaims against the real party in interest."
Just provide us with the names and addresses of the Patent Troll Lawyers . . . the Intertubers will crowdsource the contract.
Please donate the bounty money to the EFF.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Cloudflare is a multi-million dollar company and they are only willing to pay $50K for someone to make all their problems go away? Pff! Come back when you are serious.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
$50k is peanuts. Nice PR, but really not enough to scare a bunch of lawyers.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That is what I earn per year doing government IT in Silicon Valley!
What makes you so sure it's legal? Cloudflare is arguing that it's not, and the odds are they've got better lawyers than you. Both Righthaven and Prenda did get into trouble on this point.
Actually, If the summary is accurate, Cloudflare is saying it is unethical, not illegal. Which means the lawyers may be sanctioned or may be disbarred and prevented from practicing law, not that they will be criminally sanctioned.
I would need to review more than the summary to be sure. However, a lot of the ethics rules like the one Cloudfare is identifying (as opposed to some of the more important ones, like the ones preventing conflicts of interest) are antiquated rules that primarily make problems for people. They actually prevent people from getting justice because they make it harder for people who need to sue (e.g. because they were hurt by a powerful corporation) to find financing for it, to get money to cover how they were harmed, and to incentivize the corporation to improve its behavior.
Just because alleged patent trolls are doing something bad doesn't mean that the rules they get attacked with make sense.
Law is overregulated in some ways (a lot of the ethics rules should be improved) and underregulated in others (you run into a lot of real jerks who never get so much as a warning from the bar).
Real lawyers write in C++