Project Jengo: use the bounty concept to fight patent trolls

Our friends at Cloudflare have come up with an innovative way to fight patent trolls - with bounties.

In March, Cloudflare was sued by Sable Networks, who seem to make their money by suing networking giants like Cisco and Juniper over patents rather than developing technology. Rather than simply settling or defending themselves, Cloudflare (re)launched Project Jengo, a $100,000 bounty for prior art to challenge the validity of Sable Networks’ other patents.

This isn’t Cloudflare’s first rodeo, either. Cloudflare originally launched Project Jengo in 2017 with a prior art bounty than agreeing to a settlement with Blackbird Technologies.

Although this isn’t one of our normal blogs, we thought Cloudflare’s ‘trolling of patent trolls’ was worth sharing.

For more information on Project Jengo, check out Cloudflare’s blog.