Godspeed Cloudflare. Make sure to decapitate them and bury the head separately so they can't come back as a zombie.
Cloudflare goes berserk on next-gen patent troll, vows to utterly destroy it using prior-art bounties
Cloudflare says it will go above and beyond to destroy what it claims is a uniquely dangerous patent troll. The troll in question is Blackbird Technologies LLC, a law firm based in Boston, US. It has accused Cloudflare of ripping off a patent it owns on internet communications. Crucially, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said …
COMMENTS
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Friday 12th May 2017 22:35 GMT Public Citizen
The P. Troll heads should not be buried but put on a spike and displayed at the highest point of Cloudflare's Headquarters.
Cloudflare should demand that ~all~ of the P.Trolls patents become the property of Cloudflare as a condition of any settlement, and that the P.Trolls be prohibited from acquiring any future patents unless they can demonstrate that the original idea and development to a patentable state has been done substantially by the P.Troll
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Thursday 11th May 2017 16:17 GMT tony72
So...
"In the past, patent trolls had to hire lawyers and law firms," Prince said. "These guys do away with it entirely and have the owner be a law firm themselves."
So basically Blackbird Technologies LLC is to patent trolling as Prenda Law was to copyright trolling? If so then I wish CloudFlare spectacular success.
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Thursday 11th May 2017 16:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
bow and arrow - good!
machine gun and bullets, not fair!
I mean, yes, I hate patent trolls like any man (woman / women / others) on the street, but Cloudflare seem to be shifting the issue away from whether that patent held by the troll is actually valid to the irrelevant point of the TROLL! TROLL, FUGLY TROLL! - AND armed with a new kind of patent gun and we can't have that, especially as (cynical mode one) we're not pointing, but looking down the barrel.
For all I care the bunch of patents could be held by anything that can legally hold it, be it a regular specimen of a troll, a (!&**!) law firm attached to a bunch of patents, or a PM's butt holding them tightly between the (hairy) cheeks. Are those patents valid? Yes / no / dismiss, move on.
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Thursday 11th May 2017 17:55 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: bow and arrow - good!
The architecture described in the article is an HTTP proxy. Clients connect to the proxy which accesses the actual website behind the scenes and then the proxy delivers possibly modified content back to the client. The client never accesses the actual website. That's the whole point of the proxy.
So would there be any prior art for HTTP proxies around the 2002 timeframe. Well ... I suppose there's always the RFC that describes how HTTP has been carefully designed to make them possible. Would that count?
That's a serious question, by the way. In the sane world where you can't just grab an existing public standard and announce that you own it, of course it counts. In a US court hearing an IP case? Hmm ... much less clear cut. We shall see.
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Thursday 11th May 2017 20:06 GMT Roland6
Re: bow and arrow - good!
The architecture described in the article is an HTTP proxy.
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So would there be any prior art for HTTP proxies around the 2002 timeframe.
The other use of an HTTP proxy is to perform a man-in-the-middle ie. intercept attack, so another source of potential prior art will be among hackers and protocol test systems.
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Thursday 11th May 2017 19:31 GMT Uffish
Re: bow and arrow - good!
Letters Patent were invented to encourage innovation in a country. They granted a limited term monopoly as a reward for bringing something new and useful into use.
All that is ancient history now. The Patent system has been hijacked by businesses for their own ends. It's time to kick legislators where it hurts until they bring back the idea that patents are for the good of the country, not the patent holder.
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Thursday 11th May 2017 17:06 GMT Criminny Rickets
Policing websites
"we remain committed to our belief that it is not Cloudflare's role to make determinations on what content should and should not be online," "
Nor should they be making a determination of what should or should not be allowed. If they are forced down that slippery slope, where would it end? Should Cloudfare boot El Reg because they posted nasty articles against Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)? Should they block American websites that promote America first and advocate for the removal of all Muslim's from the country?
If the website in question if distasteful, complain to the website or originating host, if they are breaking the law, such as offering pirated software, report them to the proper authorities. Cloudfare is offering a service, it is not their job to police the websites that use that service, anymore than it a DNS provider's job to police computers that use their service.
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Friday 12th May 2017 08:20 GMT Vic
Re: Policing websites
Should Cloudfare boot El Reg because they posted nasty articles against Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)?
I don't think ElReg has ever posted a nasty article about the Santa Cruz Operation.
The SCO that everyone railed against was a different company - formerly Caldera. The confusion appears to be deliberate.
Vic.
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Thursday 11th May 2017 17:20 GMT hellwig
Has BlackBird gone after ISPs?
Well, BlackBird's patent seems to cover the deep packet inspection and insertion proposed (and used?) by many ISPs.
If you request data from example.com, and your ISP inserts an ad for their own internet service (and seriously, how is that a good strategy? I'm already using your internet service!), isn't that exactly what this patent covers?
Seems like a much more lucrative draw, and an ISP might be willing to license if it means they DON'T have to publicly expose what they're actually doing (to prove it doesn't violate the patent).
But maybe I misunderstood the application.
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Thursday 11th May 2017 23:53 GMT elDog
Since most of the trolls are trying to suck the blood from internet connections
Can we just suggest that they prove their point(s) in a controlled-trial basis?
I can see setting up a 2400 baud connection to a remote testing facility to show their wares. Then they could slowly let in random users and see how well their "original" invention is received. The 2400 baud is only to prevent large-scale DoS or spam adverts from the same types of preverts.
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Thursday 31st August 2017 08:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Patent Trolls or Patent Office?
Surely the problem with Patent Trolls is that they are only benefiting from the way Patents are granted in the US. How many granted patents have been shown that prior art exists and invalidated, clearly showing they should never have been granted in the first place. If the Patent requests were more rigorously checked to see if prior art existed the problem would be significantly reduced.
Perhaps the litigants in Patent cases should claim costs of the US Patent Office for patents that should never have been granted.
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Thursday 31st August 2017 09:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Patent Trolls or Patent Office?
>Surely the problem with Patent Trolls is that they are only benefiting from the way Patents are granted
Agree, my first question whenever anyone says they have a patent for x is: can you prove that you had a demonstrable implementation of x at the time of filing? if not, you've patented an idea and thus you've committed fraud as you can't patent an idea.
Whilst the patent application process no longer requires an applicant to supply an implementation of the patent, there is still the requirement that the patent is of a 'product' and not an idea.
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Friday 1st September 2017 21:43 GMT anonymous boring coward
Amy patent can look valid if it's broad enough. I hate these broad sweeping patents that seem to prove that the patent office just know eff all about what they grant patents for. Just take any obvious solution to some trivial problem and add some circumstantial stuff (web, internet, blablabla) and voila, a patent!