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

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."

Comments

Re:USPTO should be punished

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

This is not true.

Our company has filed two patents for my work. Very difficult paper work. The patent examiners are actually good. When the lawyers went through the work and rewrote it in legalese it took me weeks to understand all the import of what the application says. But the examiners got it, got to the crux of the matter and raised valid and relevant objections. They cited proper prior art. I was actually impressed by the quality of the patent examiners. After all, Albert Einstein started out as patent examiner, just saying.

We were able to explain the differences, and what was the invention and what was prior art. They made us reduce some of the expansive language added by our lawyers. So they are not all bad.

It makes me suspect if these companies game the system by filing multiple similar patents, dropping the ones that get assigned to competent examiners and pursuing the ones assigned to the weak ones.

It is like terrorism. The terrorists have to succeed only once. The law enforcement has to succeed every time.