Project Jengo is a Cloudflare effort to fight back against patent trolls by flipping the incentive structure that has encouraged the growth of patent trolls who extract settlements out of companies using frivolous lawsuits. We do this by asking the public to identify prior art that can invalidate any of the patents that a troll holds – not just the ones that are asserted against Cloudflare.

Since we launched Project Jengo over five years ago, we’ve given out over $135,000 to individuals who helped us find prior art to invalidate patents owned by patent trolls. By invalidating those patents – many of which are so blatantly marginal or broad that they never should have been granted in the first place – we hope to decrease the amount of harassment and frivolous lawsuits that patent trolls bring against innovative technology companies.

Today, we’re excited to announce three new Project Jengo winners. These individuals have helped us push forward our effort to take down patent trolls, and continue to fight trolling in favor of innovation.

The current case involves a patent troll called Sable Networks who asserted four patents that generally describe a flow-based router or a mechanism for identifying and penalizing misbehaving flows against Cloudflare. We’ve implemented Project Jengo against Sable on those four patents and their six other patents, which they haven’t asserted against Cloudflare. Today’s recipients have helped us in that fight.

And we continue to fight Sable Networks before the Court and the U.S. Patent Office as well. We have a major case update in that regard as the U.S. Patent Office agreed that most of the claims from Sable’s ’593 patent should have never been issued in the first place, which means Sable is down to two patents in their lawsuit against Cloudflare. More on that later, but first, here are the three winners from Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Project Jengo!

We are excited to announce Chris Wheeler as the winner of the 4th chapter of Project Jengo! Chris is the CTO and a co-founder of a software startup in Macon, Georgia called Tier2 Technologies, and he is now $5,000 richer!

When we asked where he had heard about Project Jengo, Chris told us:

“I heard about Project Jengo from one of your blog posts. I often read your blog on my phone from my children’s bedroom at night while I’m waiting for them to fall asleep. I’m a huge fan of Cloudflare and use your services myself extensively.”

As for why he submitted, Chris holds a patent, and submitted to Project Jengo in part because he was “drawn to the idea of helping protect the integrity of the patent system.”

Chris submitted a paper titled “A Framework for Alternate Queueing: Towards Traffic Management by PC-UNIX Based Routers” as prior art to Sable’s ’932 patent. This paper was published in 1998. On the other hand, Sable’s ’932 patent was filed in 2002 and is alleged to cover routers utilizing aggregate flow blocks that include tunnel-specific information for selected network paths. The aggregate flow blocks are also alleged to store statistics pertaining to the selected network paths. This paper, published nearly four years prior to the filing of the ’932 patent, describes a PC-UNIX based router that implements a FreeBSD Alternate Queueing (ALTQ) driver with traffic management functionalities to select network paths. ALTQ traffic management uses queueing disciplines based on stored statistical analysis of selected paths for network traffic, and this is a great prior art reference to the ’932 patent.

His breakdown of his submission is interesting too:

“When I saw the claims in 6,977,932 I immediately thought ‘They are just describing QoS in a weird convoluted way’ and I knew QoS had existed long before the patent date of 2002. I have used the ALTQ packet scheduler in pfSense a lot in the past throughout my career, and that was the first thing that came to my mind. I did a quick Google search for ‘ALTQ’ and found the oldest reference I could find, which was from 1998.”

We appreciate his efforts, as he managed to find useful prior art from four years before the patent in question. Thank you, Chris!

Additionally, we are awarding $5,000 to Peter S. for finding us a valuable thesis paper! This is Peter’s first foray into patent law, and we are so thankful for his time and effort.​​

The thesis of Rena Whei-Ming Yang found by Peter describes the solution of the ʼ593 patent almost five years before Sable even filed for the patent! The ʼ593 patent is the Sable patent concerning the detection of “bad” flows. Yang—years before Sable—developed the same thing: “This thesis studies a means of using such mechanisms to identify nonadaptive network flows, and proposes a protocol to push this information, along with penalization responsibility, towards the flows’ sources.” What Sable calls “bad,” Yang labels “nonadaptive.” The important thing is that Yang’s work predates the ’593 patent’s alleged new solutions by years, making it a great find. Thank you, Peter!

Finally, we are excited to announce the winner from the 6th Chapter of Project Jengo, and that is David H. who is receiving a $5,000 prize! David’s background is in accounting/finance, but became interested in patents and IP back in 2010. He heard about Project Jengo through a LinkedIn post and thought it was an excellent idea, so he put his search skills to task.

David identified U.S. Patent No. 6,859,438 for us, which is a patent entitled “Policy Based Quality of Service.” This ’438 patent discloses the same “quality of service” (or QoS) technology claimed in Sable’s ’431 patent, with one important difference: the disclosure of the ’438 patent dates back to an application filed on February 3, 1998, but the disclosure in the ’431 patent wasn’t filed until (at the earliest), April 19, 2000. So the technology explained in the ’438 patent—a flexible, policy-based, mechanism for managing, monitoring, and prioritizing traffic within a network and allocating bandwidth to achieve true QoS—beat Sable to the punch on the “new” switching technology claimed in the ’431 patent that purports to provide a previously “unavailable” degree of quality of service, by more than two years! Excellent find, David!

He also shared his thoughts on the current state of the U.S. patent system:

“The US Patent Office continues to issue patents that are likely invalid on a number of grounds with a large proportion to big tech. The USPTO has a nice fee generating business, being able to get paid issuing patents and subsequently canceling them in post grant proceedings. I am hopeful the USPTO adopts new technology to aid examiners in their prosecution efforts.”

Thank you, David!

* * *

Congratulations and our deep gratitude to all three winners from Chapters 4-6 of Project Jengo. Remember, we have committed \$100,000 to this prior art search, and we still have $50,000 to give out! The search is still ongoing, so please help us beat the patent troll by submitting prior art references here. The submission deadline for Chapter 7 is January 31, 2023, so don’t delay your search!

When Sable sued us almost two years ago in March 2021, they accused us of infringing four different patents, which included a total of 134 claims. We previously shared how we successfully killed off one of the four patents, known as the ’932 patent.

Today, we have more great news to share. The U.S. Patent Office agreed with us that all the claims from the ’593 patent that Sable asserted against us are invalid. This means we were able to get yet another patent – the ’593 patent – dropped out of Sable’s case against us.

A single U.S. patent usually has somewhere around 10 to 20 claims (here’s a Wiki page explaining what a “claim” is in patents), but Sable’s ’593 patent included a whopping number of claims – 44 to be exact. As we previously shared back in January 2022, the Patent Office ruled that we would likely be successful in invalidating all 44 claims of the ’593 patent and instituted a trial proceeding known as inter partes review (IPR). Since then, Sable voluntarily canceled 17 of the claims – presumably because they themselves knew those claims were invalid. Of the remaining 27 claims, the Patent Office determined that 23 claims were invalid. Because none of the four surviving claims – which escaped invalidation only by virtue of a procedural technicality – are part of Sable’s case against us, the ’593 patent is no longer asserted against us. And given the record we have established before the Patent Office, we don’t think Sable will try asserting those four surviving claims from the ’593 patent against any of our peer companies. But even if Sable does, they should be able to leverage what we’ve done and kill off the patent completely.

Our victory was covered by multiple legal news outlets such as Bloomberg Law and Law360 (unfortunately, subscription required). A special shoutout to our attorney Jim Day of Farella Braun + Martel, who fought hard to get rid of these toxic claims that should have never been issued! With two patents completely out of the case, there are now only two patents at issue in Sable’s case against us.

We have even more good news to share! In October 2022, the Court found nine claims from one of the two remaining patents – the ’431 patent – to be invalid for failure to meet certain statutory requirements. This means Sable only has 14 claims from two patents in the case. Considering that we started this journey with Sable asserting 131 claims from four patents against us, we are proud of what we have accomplished thus far. We successfully persuaded the Court and the Patent Office to cancel, or forced Sable to voluntarily cancel, almost 90% of those 131 claims. Those victories not only help us in our case against Sable, they will also protect all innovative companies from being accused frivolously of infringing those invalid claims.

Our trial is scheduled for November 2023, but we will have more updates for you before then. Stay tuned, and remember to go look for prior art references to help us in our fight against this patent troll!

We are excited to announce another Project Jengo winner, and provide you with an important update on our fight against Sable Networks.

As a reminder, Project Jengo is Cloudflare’s efforts to flip the incentive structure that has encouraged the growth of patent trolls that seek to leverage overbroad and unpracticed patents to extract settlements from operating entities. We do this by refusing to settle patent cases brought against us by trolls, and instead, use a crowdsourced bounty to identify prior art that undermines the value of the troll’s patents, and not just the ones asserted against Cloudflare. This is the second iteration of Project Jengo, which is focused on a patent troll called Sable.

Even though the case against Sable has been active for over a year now, and we’ve already achieved some great results, we haven’t let up the pressure. We’re now also giving out Cloudflare T-shirts to new Project Jengo participants – all you need to do is submit prior art related to any of the Sable patents this year and the first 100 participants with a U.S. mailing address will receive a Cloudflare t-shirt.

We have already awarded $30,000 so far to winners of the Sable-focused Project Jengo. Last quarter, we awarded $10,000 to a former R&D engineer from Rennes, France who heard about Project Jengo through Hacker News. This round, we are excited to announce that we’ll be awarding Curtis Carter with $5,000!

In explaining why he participated in Project Jengo, Curtis said:

“As a maintainer/contributor for several open source projects (NuGetDefense being my main project), I'm always afraid some troll is going to attack one of my projects or a project I contribute to, and I may not be able to afford stopping it.”

That is why we started Project Jengo – to help support and protect innovators against malicious patent trolls. They hinder innovation of productive companies, and trade in fear as currency. As Curtis highlighted, the future is brighter without trolls:

“I think what you are doing is for the good of future generations, and I'm proud I got to participate even if I hadn't won anything.”

Developers and innovators should not work in fear that trolls will target them for frivolous settlements. The patent system was built to promote innovation, not destroy it.

Not only does Curtis maintain NuGetDefense (a known vulnerability scanner for the .Net NuGet ecosystem), he’s also an engineer at Tech Friends, Inc., a software development company that he claims is the best employer for software developers in Northeast Arkansas. Impressively, he is self-taught.

“This was the first time in a while that I dug into old research documents and patents. Honestly, the people who originally put this stuff together were often brilliant, and their work is a joy to read (even if it's a bit dry).”

As for his submission, Curtis Carter took on the challenge of finding prior art for United States Patent No. 8,085,775, an over broad patent that Sable owns and generally covers a mechanism for identifying, classifying, and controlling flows over a network.

Sable chose not to assert that patent against Cloudflare in our ongoing litigation. The prior art he found specifically addresses “methods, apparatuses and systems directed to a flow-based, traffic-classification-aware data collection and reporting system…” according to its abstract (US Patent No. 7,385,924). Furthermore, the prior art Curtis found pre-dates Sable’s patent by just over three years.

Curtis's discovery has the added benefit of teaching many concepts to the narrower ’593 patent that Sable is asserting in the lawsuit. The narrower patent specifically addresses a method for identifying and penalizing misbehaving flows in a network. Side note: the patent is so old that its background description references some ancient applications:

“With the advent of file sharing applications such as KaZaA, Gnutella, BearShare, and Winny, the amount of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic on the Internet has grown immensely in recent years.”

The prior art found by Curtis demonstrates TCP’s use of a sliding window scheme in which flow control is exercised over incoming flows. This is exactly the type of flow control both patents purport to cover. Furthermore, we were impressed with Curtis’ efforts to find prior art related to one of the narrower patents owned by Sable – well done, Mr. Carter!

As for what his discovery looks like, take a look at the first sentence of the patent’s abstract to get an idea.

Methods, apparatuses and systems directed to a flow-based, traffic-classification-aware data collection and reporting system that combine flow-based data collection technologies with enhanced traffic classification functionality to allow for analysis and reporting into aspects of network operations that prior art systems cannot provide.

If you haven’t won yet, don’t be discouraged. We have committed \$100,000 to this prior art search, so we still have \$65,000 to give out!

As part of our fight against Sable, we’ve been involved in a year-long process before the US Patent Office called Inter Partes Review (or “IPR”) with the goal of invalidating patents held by Sable Networks. You can check out our blog post from 2017 that outlines how the IPR process works. In our last blog post, we were pleased to announce that the Patent Office agreed to institute IPR on some of Sable’s patents. Today, we’re even happier to announce that we’ve officially killed off Sable’s ‘932 patent.

Once the Patent Office agrees to review the validity of a patent, the owner of the patent typically files a brief defending the validity of its patent (because if you own it you should think it’s valid, right?). But in this case, instead of explaining to the Patent Office why its ’932 patent is valid (or why Cloudflare is wrong), Sable simply decided to voluntarily cancel all claims of the patent. Since there is no claim left for the Patent Office to review, the IPR should be terminated soon, and we’ve effectively obtained the full relief requested!

This is a big win for anyone concerned with abuse of the patent system, including all the companies that Sable Networks previously attacked with this patent, including Dell, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper Networks, Aruba Networks, amongst others. Yes, as absurd as it sounds, this patent has been used by Sable Networks to help squeeze out settlements from numerous productive technology companies. This victory means that Sable has one less patent to try to leverage in its attempts to abuse the patent system.

As we mentioned in our February blog post, part of our goal with Project Jengo is to spread the word that targets of these trolls can and should fight back and win. That’s why we were thrilled to see a recent blog post from Coinbase announcing that the company is following Cloudflare’s lead when it comes to pushing back on patent trolls. Trolls count on easy targets to fund their operations through settlements, so it’s great news that a major company like Coinbase has made clear that it will refuse to capitulate and will instead fight back.

We could not have gotten to this point without the help of the many Project Jengo participants. We have received hundreds of prior art references on Sable’s ten patents, and we have used many of those references in our efforts to kill off the patents that Sable asserted against us.

Thank you to everyone who has participated in Project Jengo for supporting the broader community and helping us take down a patent troll. If you haven’t participated yet, please consider submitting to our prior art contest.

This past April we announced the revival of Project Jengo in response to a patent troll called Sable Networks that sued Cloudflare even though our technology and products are nothing like what’s described in Sable’s patents. This is only one part of Sable’s larger campaign against innovative technology companies — Sable sued five other technology companies earlier this year, and had sued seven other technology companies under the same patents last year.

Just as we have done in the past, we decided to fight back rather than feed the troll — which would only make it stronger. You see, unlike Cloudflare and other operating companies that were sued, Sable Networks isn’t in the business of providing products and services to the market. Rather, it exists to extract settlements out of productive companies that are creating value to the society.

Project Jengo is a prior art search contest where we ask the Cloudflare community for help in finding evidence (“prior art”) that shows Sable’s patents are invalid because they claim something that was already known at the time the patent application was filed. We committed $100,000 in cash prizes to be shared by the winners who were successful in finding such prior art.

The first chapter of this contest has now ended, and we received almost 400 prior art references on Sable’s ten patents. And over 80% of those references were submitted to kill off the four patents that Sable asserted against us. Let me first say thank you to everyone who submitted these! Here at Cloudflare, we are constantly energized and motivated by the support from our community, and we are heartened by our community’s participation in Project Jengo.

We reviewed every eligible submission and scored them based on the strength of the prior art reference(s), difficulty, the story provided by the entrant, and the clarity and thoroughness of the explanation. Today, we are announcing the selection of three great submissions as cash prize winners in this round. The first winner will receive \$10,000, and the other two will each receive \$5,000.

As you’ll recall, Sable is using a set of patents from the early 2000’s related to a flow-based router called Apeiro, which was never widely adopted and eventually failed in the marketplace over a decade ago. Sable is now stretching those patents way beyond what they were meant to cover. Sable’s flawed reading of these patents extends infringement to basic routing and switching functionality known long before any alleged invention date, including “conventional routers” from the 2000s that routed each packet independently without any regard to flows. The way Sable is interpreting its patents so broadly and the fact that Sable has gone after numerous technology companies selling a wide range of different products worry us — by its current standard, Sable could target anyone using a router, and that would include anyone with a WiFi router in their home. You can help stop this madness by participating in this contest and finding prior art on any of Sable’s ten patents that we’ve identified — not just on the four patents that Sable asserted against us.

The contest is ongoing, and we still have $80,000 to give out. The sooner you send us quality prior-art references, the more helpful they will be in invalidating Sable’s patents, so please make your submissions here as soon as possible. Already made a submission, but you aren’t one of the three winners today? It isn’t over — we will consider your submission again when we announce our next round of winners in November (and you can, of course, also enter a new and better submission). We have many more rounds to go as long as Sable’s case is pending against us, which means earlier submissions benefit from being considered in multiple rounds of this contest, so please don’t delay and make your submission now.

If this were a boxing match, then we would still be in the first round, sparring in the ring, with Sable up against the ropes. So jump in, win some cash, and help us KO Sable Networks.

This document is one of the 17 prior-art references sent to us by Matthew M. We are highlighting the Internet Engineering Task Force (“IETF”) Request for Comments (“RFC”) 2702. An RFC is something like a step in an industry-wide brainstorming session where an idea or ideas are floated to others in the industry with the aim of building something great everyone can use. The RFC found by Matthew M. is a good example of the process in which engineers from MCI Worldcom are building on the work of engineers from companies like Cisco, IBM, Juniper, and Ascend. All of these companies were well aware of the concepts Sable is now trying to claim its patents cover, including “micro-flows,” label-switched paths, and the basic concept of choosing a path through the network based on QoS information in a packet. The IETF’s records of these industry-wide brainstorming sessions are great evidence of Sable’s overreaching interpretations of its patents.

As for the winner, Matthew has a degree in Computer Networking & Cybersecurity, and manages a small team of developers at a FinTech company. Like most Project Jengo participants, he wasn’t motivated solely by the money. He told us, “I quickly learned just how vague you can make a patent and it’s quite disgusting.” We agree! Matthew shared that he thinks patent trolls “provide no value to society and only exist to strip true business men and women of their hard-earned craft.” He underscored this point when we reached out to congratulate him on the $10,000 prize:

I can’t stand blockers to true American ingenuity and patent trolls stand to destroy hard-earned work using minuscule technicalities in our broken justice system. I am happy to do my part in helping Cloudflare get the upper hand in this lawsuit and hopefully flip it on its head and take down Sable Networks altogether.

Matthew also highlighted the tremendous damage that patent trolls can do to companies and innovation:

I think patent trolls are one of the biggest stiflers of innovation. Companies like Cloudflare could be spending all their time working on new products that provide value but instead, they must allocate resources to fight off cowardly lawsuits like this one.

This submission will be put to good use in our fight against Sable, and we were happy to award Matthew with his prize money. We smiled when Matthew exclaimed he was “speechless” after finding out that he won. Congratulations, Matthew!

This winning submission also included an RFC from the IETF. These records from the important work of the IETF members ensure Sable won’t be able to take credit for things it simply didn’t invent. The neat thing about RFC 1953 is that the submitter connected it with actual products from companies called Ipsilon Networks, Inc. and Ascend Communications. There appear to be similarities between those products and the technology Sable is now claiming to have made, like the inventions of the ’919 patent. The problem for Sable is that Ipsilon and Ascend appear to have done it first! Ipsilon and Ascend were acquired by other companies so finding details about their innovative products and technology may be difficult, but we’re going to try. It may be that the submitter or someone reading this post can help.

The submission came from Pedro S., who heard about Project Jengo on the Security Now podcast. Pedro has spent 20 years in various technical roles, including a position at Ascend Communications in the 1990’s where he became familiar with their products. Today he is working at a cybersecurity company in the Bay Area. When asked why he chose to participate, he bluntly responded with “I hate patent trolls — I also enjoyed the trip down memory lane as some of the stuff I submitted comes from my days at Lucent.” We are happy to hear he enjoyed participating in the fight! We’re enjoying it too, thanks to the participation of folks like Pedro.

Congratulations, Pedro!

This submission pointed us to U.S. Patent No. 7,107,356 (“’356 patent”) for its relevance to Sable’s U.S. Patent No. 7,630,358 (Mechanism for implementing multiple logical routers within a single physical router). The ’358 patent hasn’t been asserted against Cloudflare (at least not yet), and this is a good example of the enthusiasm of our community to comprehensively search for prior art relevant to both Sable’s currently asserted patents and those it may use to sue other companies later down the road. The ’356 patent found by our final winner in this round of Project Jengo carefully describes the guts of a router, and this relatively straight-forward patent makes short work of Sable’s overreaching claims of invention. Rest assured, if Sable is looking to assert the ’358 patent against Cloudflare or some other company down the road, our community is well-prepared to meet the challenge.

The submission comes from Stephen F., a web developer at a managed IT company working on custom websites. When his IT coworker shared the Project Jengo announcement in the office chat, he decided to participate. Stephen has never done prior art search before, but he was eager to participate and spent an entire day looking for prior art:

I'm submitting because I love Cloudflare and how it has made my life easier as a web developer … I've had to learn a lot more about routing and patent law today, and spent several hours looking at documents, scholarly journals, etc.

Even though this was his first time researching something like this, he understood the importance of beating Sable Networks:

I stand firmly against patent trolls like Sable, and decided to spend my day looking into prior art for the sake of Cloudflare's continued success.

Not only did Stephen understand the importance of beating Sable, he also understood the challenges in doing a prior art search, but that didn’t stop him! We admire his tenacity and are impressed with his efforts, and some of the challenges he had to overcome during his search:

I needed to find where the patents could have been stolen/read from each other and what the offending points of the patents would be. During my research I learned a LOT about patent law, which was pretty challenging!

Congratulations, Stephen!

We received almost 400 prior art references thus far, and as promised we are making them public. As a reminder, we are collecting prior art on any of the patents owned by Sable, not just the ones asserted against Cloudflare. You can go to the webpage we’ve set up to see them, and we hope this information is of use to anyone who is sued by Sable down the road.

Project Jengo continues to capture the attention of tech media. It’s important to us to keep the narrative alive — the more awareness we can spread about the true harm of patent trolls, the more likely we are to inspire other well-resourced companies to refuse to capitulate. If we do this together, we’re far more likely to set a new standard, and ultimately, find the antidote to the ever-growing number of patent trolls that plague productive companies. If we enter the battle alone we are strong, but if we fight together we are unstoppable! Here’s what we’ve seen since our initial blog post was published (news outlets appear to be just as enthusiastic as we are!):

• “Cloudflare offers $100,000 for prior art to nuke networking patents a troll has accused it of ripping off,” – The Register

• “Instead of just saying it wouldn't settle, Cloudflare set out to completely destroy the patent troll who sued it, ” – Techdirt

• “The idea is to deal a big enough blow to Sable that not only is its case against Cloudflare hobbled but also future cases against other entities.” – Techcrunch

It has been five months since Sable Networks sued us in Waco, Texas, and we want to share a quick update on the litigation front. Since then, we have filed four petitions with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for inter partes review (“IPR”), seeking to invalidate the four asserted patents. As we previously explained, IPR is a procedure for challenging the validity of a patent before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and it is supposed to be faster and cheaper than litigating before a U.S. district court. Of course, faster and cheaper are relative — it still takes about 18 months to invalidate a patent using this procedure, and the filing fees alone for the four petitions were over $200,000. It is easy to see how the exorbitant cost involved in patent litigation allows patent trolls to flourish and why so many companies are willing to quickly settle.

Aside from the IPRs, our litigation is moving forward in district court. Sable served us with its preliminary infringement contentions, which are supposed to explain why it believes we infringe its four asserted patents, and we will be serving our preliminary invalidity contentions to Sable soon.

Sable went after six companies earlier this year, and three of them have already settled and dropped out of the fight. We will continue to fight against Sable, and we hope to see our peers continue fighting against this patent troll with us. Please stay tuned for our next update in three months!