'Troll' Loses Cloudflare Lawsuit, Has Weaponized Patent Invalidated (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:10AM from the bye-bye-blackbird dept.

A federal judge in San Francisco has unequivocally ruled against a non-practicing entity that had sued Cloudflare for patent infringement. From a report: The judicial order effectively ends the case that Blackbird -- which Cloudflare had dubbed a "patent troll" -- had brought against the well-known security firm and content delivery network. "Abstract ideas are not patentable," US District Judge Vincent Chhabria wrote in a Monday order. The case revolved around US Patent No. 6,453,335, which describes providing a "third party data channel" online. When the case was filed in May 2017, the invention claims it can incorporate third-party data into an existing Internet connection "in a convenient and flexible way."

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Summary Service by Anonymous Coward · 2018-02-13 07:07 · Score: 2, Informative

For those too lazy to read the article and patent, it's a patent on intercepting traffic with a device (e.g. proxy) and altering the data based on third party settings, like changing a 404 page to an ad.
It was tossed out because it was broad enough to basically say "intercept stuff and change it."