An inside account of Cloudflare's defeat of Blackbird's lawsuit by publishing “prior art” that could help others, and attacking the patent troll business model
Remember 2016? Pokemon Go was all the rage, we lost Prince, and there were surprising election results in both the UK and US.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece is Cloudflare's own retrospective on Project Jengo, the counter-offensive it launched after Blackbird sued it in 2017 — including the prior art bounty that paid outsiders to dig up evidence against the asserted patents.
The strategy already had a courtroom verdict by early 2018, when a US court dismissed the Blackbird suit and invalidated its patent on the grounds that abstract ideas are not patentable. The 2019 post packages that win as a reusable template — one Cloudflare went on to run again when Sable Networks sued, with a $100K bounty, and later invalidated parts of three Sable patents through the same crowdsourcing.
First-order effects
- Blackbird's asserted patent is dead — dismissed and invalidated — and because Cloudflare published the prior art openly, any company facing the same claims can now cite that evidence without paying to rediscover it.
- Cloudflare converts a defensive legal cost into public infrastructure: the bounty findings outlive the lawsuit and lower the barrier for every future defendant hit by the same portfolio.
Second-order effects
- Other patent holders suing Cloudflare now face a known playbook — Sable Networks' suit triggered the identical bounty response, meaning assertion against Cloudflare carries a reputational and invalidation risk beyond ordinary litigation exposure.
- Patent assertion firms lose leverage against well-resourced tech defendants generally: if one target can crowdsource invalidating art cheaply, the expected value of filing against any similar company drops.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, litigation shifts from a private settlement negotiation to a public contest over whether the patent should exist at all — favoring defendants who can mobilize communities and starving trolls of the quick-settlement economics their model depends on.
- Courts treating abstract-idea patents as unpatentable, combined with crowdsourced prior art, points toward weaker software patents clearing the system earlier — though how far that reaches beyond deep-pocketed defendants is genuinely unresolved.
The trend: Deep-pocketed tech defendants are turning patent defense into offense, using bounties and published prior art to invalidate troll portfolios rather than settle — Cloudflare's Jengo is the template case.