Arkansas engineer wins round 3 of Project Jengo, and Cloudflare continues to win at the Patent Office

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.

$5,000 to Project Jengo’s round three winner!

We have already awarded $30,000 Continue reading

Former R&D Engineer Wins Round 2 of Project Jengo, and Cloudflare Wins at the Patent Office

The classic children’s fairy tale The Three Billy Goats Gruff tells the story of three goats trying to cross a bridge to a field of yummy grass, despite the monstrous troll that lives underneath the bridge and threatens to eat them. To beat the troll, the goats played on his greed and proceeded across the bridge in order from smallest to largest – and holding the troll at bay each time with promises of a larger meal if he waited for the larger goat to follow. In the end, the troll passed on attacking the smaller goats and was left to do battle with the largest goat who was able to defeat the troll, toss him off the bridge, and watch him float downstream. The goats were then able to enjoy the yummy grass, troll-free. In our fight against Sable Networks (patent troll), we plan on being that third goat, and our recent wins suggest we might be on track to do just that.

$10,000 to our second round of Project Jengo winner!

We started Project Jengo 2 last year as a prior art search contest, so we could enlist your help in the battle against Sable Networks. We committed Continue reading