Cloudflare Pays First $7,500 Bounties In War Against Patent Troll (cloudflare.com)

Cloudflare declared war on a group of lawyers that files patent lawsuits against tech firms, by offering bounties for the discovery of patent-invalidating "prior art." Now an anonymous reader writes: On Thursday, Cloudflare announced it has paid out the first $7,500 to people who discovered documents that could help invalidate Blackbird's patents. The money is part of a $100,000 war chest the company announced this spring... The company said it is ready to launch individual challenges to specific Blackbird patents. The company believes it has enough examples of prior art on US Patent 7,797,448, "GPS-internet Linkage" and US Patent 6,453,335 (the one asserted against Cloudflare) to lodge a challenge.
"We have received more than 230 submissions so far," Cloudflare reports, "and have only just begun to scratch the surface."

Comments

Re:Those deck chairs won't self-rearrange.

[Zocalo]

I think the problem is more fundamental than that. By paying patent examiners to approve patents, you're also effectively encouraging them to fail to do their jobs properly and just rubber stamp any random patent that they review; whether or not the examiners are competent or not doesn't enter into it. The fix is to turn that on its head and pay the examiners a commission/bonus for each patent that they can find prior art on or find a justifiable reason to invalidate the claim. Better yet, start with a reasonable low fee and/or bond, but have the number of previous failed applications result in successively higher submission fees/bonds for subsequent patent applications. That way you don't discriminate against smaller inventors who may not be able to afford large application fees, or even larger companies that file a lot of valid patent applications, but you do have a clear financial deterrant against the patent trolls that churn out an endless stream of frivolous and/or over-reaching patents.