Congratulations to Cloudflare on Beating Patent Troll Blackbird Technologies
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2018-02-13 18:24:41 UTC
- Modified: 2018-02-13 18:24:41 UTC
Previously:
Summary: After nearly a year in the court (no doubt an expensive exercise for Cloudflare) the Northern District of California finally dismisses the lawsuit, deeming the underlying claims “[a]bstract ideas [which] are not patentable”
THIS is certain to receive more press coverage soon. We first found out about this nearly 6 hours ago, after this post by Doug Kramer, titled
"Bye Bye Blackbird" (with a clever picture, too).
Those are
USPTO-granted patents which we wrote about in the summer of 2017 (see index above). To quote Kramer:
As we have talked about repeatedly in this blog, we at Cloudflare are not fans of the behavior of patent trolls. They prey upon innovative companies using overly-broad patents in an attempt to bleed settlements out of their targets. When we were first sued by a patent troll called Blackbird Technologies last spring, we decided that we weren’t going along with their game by agreeing to a modest settlement in lieu of going through the considerable effort and expense of litigation. We decided to fight.
We’re happy to report that earlier today, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the case that Blackbird brought against Cloudflare. In a two-page order (copied below) Judge Vince Chhabria noted that “[a]bstract ideas are not patentable” and then held that Blackbird’s attempted assertion of the patent “attempts to monopolize the abstract idea of monitoring a preexisting data stream between a server” and is invalid as a matter of law. That means that Blackbird loses no matter what the facts of the case would have been.
Well done to this legal team. It may have just saved other victims of Blackbird (present and future). Let's hope we never again hear this troll's name.
⬆
