Prior Art Wanted—Cash Reward, PTAB Litigation Blog
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Recently, Cloudflare Inc. succeeded in convincing the PTAB to institute in IPR2021-00969 against a Sable Network, Inc.’s patent directed toward data flow. While the institution itself is not out of the ordinary—the petitioner, Cloudflare, is. After being accused of infringing four of Sable’s data flow patents in the Western District of Texas, Cloudflare took the fight to the internet and is crowdsourcing its efforts to identify invalidating prior art. As part of those efforts, Cloudflare has offered a “$100,000 bounty” for anyone who submits prior art that could be used to invalidate Sable’s patent. To date, Cloudflare has already awarded $20,000 to three individuals who identified what Cloudflare has judged to be the best prior art, and Cloudflare promises to continue to award money for prior art that can be used not only to invalidate Sable’s asserted patents, but its entire patent portfolio.
