
Cloudflare Declares War on a Patent Troll with $50,000 Bounty - nitin_flanker
http://fortune.com/2017/05/11/blackbird-patent-troll/
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distances
Previous discussion at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14316486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14316486).

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moonshinefe
I hope Cloudflare wins this one because screw patent trolls.

I have to say though, a company that's looking at massive patent fees vs. the
paltry $50k offered for someone to play lawyer for them, and the fact their
security bug bounty program gets you a whole 1 year's free service + a limited
edition t-shirt (!!) + on some website hall of fame...

I don't understand why their policy is literally "Let's toss 1 dollar bills at
people and hopefully someone will go to bat for us!" instead of paying regular
fees for real lawyers or anywhere near industry standards for bounties. It
seems almost insulting.

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toyg
I think this is in addition to actual lawyering - it's an extra "public
research" budget of sort, open to everyone, in the hope that people can help
them amass bits of info to form an unstoppable wave of prior art.

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jmmcd
Next twist: Blackbird provides the prior art and claims the bounty.

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jwilk
Archived copy, which can be read without JS enabled:

[https://archive.fo/zjFdt](https://archive.fo/zjFdt)

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sha666sum
I ran into a CloudFlare DDoS protection screen and had to enable JS.

The irony is real.

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jwilk
Turns out you can make the original article readable by fiddling a bit with
CSS.

In Firefox, go to style editor (Shift+F7) and remove the .hide-fonts rule.

Or add this to your userContent.css:

    
    
        @-moz-document domain(fortune.com) {
            .hide-fonts * {
                 visibility: visible !important;
            }
        }

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JacobJack
Such a vague patent shouldn't have been accepted in the first place. It's
essentially an idea with no specific details. How long before we get a patent
on "Something that serves a purpose of any kind" ?

[http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-
bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN/7174362)

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JokerDan
This is just more ammo in the 'Patent system is broken, just abolish it'
argument. From my point of view it harms innovation. Sadly there is the valid
view that it helps the newer inventor though. The whole Patent system makes me
sad.

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rodionos
Not to undermine the effort, but $50K doesn't qualify as war by any measure. A
war-like outcome would be seeking to bankrupt the troll or at least severely
constraint its ability to abuse the legal system in the future.

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pearjuice
>[...] Blackbird, popped up last year after several attorneys quit their jobs
at big law firms to try their hand at "patent trolling"

Sadly, "Patent trolling" is to law as to what "creating an unicorn startup" is
to tech. High risk, everyone dislikes it but the payout is great if it works.

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nikanj
Where's the risk?

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pearjuice
A company (like Cloudflare) pulling a 180.

