It certainly benefits Cloudflare by making any patent troll think twice before suing them, but to a lesser extent, it also benefits the entire tech industry:
Cloudflare set an example that anyone with similar resources can follow.
And Cloudflare shared many of the results of their work, including an extensive prior art portfolio. This can be useful to anyone who gets sued for these and possibly similar patents.
I really hope more companies will follow Cloudflare's example.
The example might encourage other companies to do the same.
Then it would have a real impact for everyone.
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won
by Balanceinfinity on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @01:57PM
(#21455441)
Under game theory, the best response is tit for tat - it would presumably help for the entire industry
How is this patent troll demolished? Won't they just go acquire more patents for $1 + 'other valuable considerations' and continue on?
Re:We Stood Up to a Patent Troll and Won
by joshuaissac on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @01:52PM
(#21455387)
Many of the patents in their portfolio now have publicly-accessible crowdsourced prior art pools that defendants can use to invalidate more patents. They can still buy new patents, but because of what has already happened, they are down on staff. They have not been vanquished, but they have been weakened.
I'm aware but it isn't hard to interpret this as "they lost nothing more than the use of some number of $1 patents and the time it takes them to go find more $1 patents".
That doesn't seem like that big of a setback.
That fact that the company dropped from 12 people to 3 is a big tell. No new cash is coming in. They can’t get ppl to work for free and hope to get a nice big cash infusion soon (in the form of patent royalties).
They have very effectively demolished one patent troll. This will ensure that only people who are very sure of the validity of their patents will use them against CloudFlare. Does it make any other targets more scary? Is there that a patent troll wouldn't do now that they would have done previously, apart from attack CloudFlare specifically?
One less patent troll is definitely a good thing, and I'm always happy to see someone fight back. I think we should be careful not to assign too much scope to the victory though.