How Cloudflare is using a prior art bounty and other aggressive tactics to respond to a suit from “patent troll” Blackbird
Context & Ripple Effects
When Blackbird sued Cloudflare in 2017, the company chose not to settle quietly but to open-source its own defense: a public bounty for prior art that could kill the asserted patent. The follow-on coverage shows the bet paid off — a US court dismissed the suit and invalidated Blackbird's patent as an unpatentable abstract idea, and Cloudflare later published an inside account of how publishing prior art helped defeat the case.
The significance is that this was not a one-off stunt. Cloudflare ran the same playbook again years later, offering a $100K bounty against Sable Networks' patents and ultimately invalidating parts of three of them through its Project Jengo crowdsourcing effort.
First-order effects
- Blackbird's lawsuit now has to survive not just Cloudflare's lawyers but a global crowd paid to find disqualifying prior art, raising the cost and uncertainty of pressing the claim.
- Cloudflare converts a defensive legal expense into a publicity campaign that frames Blackbird as a 'patent troll' attacking the internet infrastructure sector.
Second-order effects
- Other companies targeted by patent-assertion firms gain a proven template: Cloudflare's repeat use of the bounty against Sable Networks shows the tactic is reusable, not situational.
- Patent holders with thin or software-shaped portfolios face a new risk calculus — asserting a weak patent against a well-resourced defendant can end in the patent itself being invalidated, destroying its value entirely.
Third-order effects
- If courts keep accepting crowdsourced prior art and abstract-idea arguments, the economics of patent assertion tilt structurally against trolls: the downside shifts from a settlement check to losing the asset.
- Defensive litigation becomes a public, community-driven activity rather than a private negotiation, pressuring the broader market for litigated software patents.
The trend: Deep-pocketed tech defendants are replacing quiet settlements with crowdsourced, public counterattacks designed to invalidate the asserted patents themselves.