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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the punished-with-prior-art dept.

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."

7 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. Those deck chairs won't self-rearrange. by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As long as pathetically obvious patents like these are granted in the first place, it's always going to be whack-a-mole. And as long as the USPTO is funded by charging fees for granting patents (and not just applying for them) the situation will persist.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    1. Re:Those deck chairs won't self-rearrange. by stabiesoft · · Score: 2

      I think the problem is the application fee is pretty cheap compared to the cost the submitter pays to the lawyers to submit it. The lawyers outgun the patent examiners and the result is the roughly 50% grant rate. The examiners are just not up to the task and as I recall, the patent office actually gives some of the fee to the treasury making the matter worse. If all the money for applications were used to examine it would be a start. Perhaps one approach would be you must file a bond of say 50K with each application and if the examiner finds prior art, the examiner keeps the bond. Now that would incentivize the examiner, probably too much but might be interesting to see what happens with the pendulum swung toward too hard to get a patent. Of course if the examiner does approve the patent you get the 50K back.

    2. Re:Those deck chairs won't self-rearrange. by Zocalo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
    3. Re: Those deck chairs won't self-rearrange. by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 2

      Patent examiners are remunerated based on how many patents they grant. Disallow a large number of patents because they're trivially obvious and you lose pay, or possibly get fired. Rubberstamp everything that crosses your desk and you get a performance bonus.

      This is not a system that produces good/valid patents.

    4. Re: Those deck chairs won't self-rearrange. by tepples · · Score: 2

      Where on the USPTO's fee schedule (https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-payment/uspto-fee-schedule) do you see a fee for issuing a patent?

      Under "Patent Post-Allowance Fees" are several line items containing the term "issue fee". In addition, "fees to maintain an issued patent" apply only to issued patents, not to applications that do not result in issuing a patent.

    5. Re: Those deck chairs won't self-rearrange. by Theaetetus · · Score: 2

      Patent examiners are remunerated based on how many patents they grant. Disallow a large number of patents because they're trivially obvious and you lose pay, or possibly get fired. Rubberstamp everything that crosses your desk and you get a performance bonus.

      This is not a system that produces good/valid patents.

      Actually, patent examiners are remunerated based on how many patents they bring to a final disposition. That includes granting, but it also includes rejecting. Rubberstamp everything "rejected" and you'll get the same performance bonus.

  2. Re:An entire $7500?! by Gaygirlie · · Score: 2

    Who cares? Even crumbs is better than nothing when it avoids going into patent-trolls' pockets!