Arkansas Engineer Wins Round 3 of Project Jengo; Sable Drops Another Patent
Cloudflare has announced the latest winner in its Project Jengo prior art bounty, and reported another victory in its ongoing battle against patent troll Sable Networks. The company is paying out $5,000 to Curtis Carter, an engineer from Northeast Arkansas, for his submission targeting one of Sable’s patents.
Project Jengo is Cloudflare’s attempt to disrupt the economics of patent trolling. Instead of settling with Sable, Cloudflare has opened a crowdsourced bounty to find prior art that invalidates the troll’s patents — not just the ones asserted against Cloudflare. The current round is focused on Sable’s portfolio, and the company has committed $100,000 to the effort, meaning roughly $65,000 is still up for grabs. Cloudflare also announced that the first 100 participants this year submitting prior art related to any of the Sable patents will receive a Cloudflare t-shirt.
Third Round Winner Takes on a Broad Flow-Control Patent
Carter, who maintains the NuGetDefense vulnerability scanner for the .Net ecosystem and works as an engineer at Tech Friends, Inc., submitted prior art against United States Patent No. 8,085,775. That patent broadly covers mechanisms for identifying, classifying, and controlling flows over a network. Notably, Sable did not assert this patent against Cloudflare in the current litigation.
Carter’s discovery is US Patent No. 7,385,924, which predates Sable’s patent by just over three years. Per its abstract, the prior art covers “methods, apparatuses and systems directed to a flow-based, traffic-classification-aware data collection and reporting system.”
Beyond covering the broader ’775 patent, Carter’s find also teaches many of the concepts in the narrower ’593 patent that Sable is actively asserting in court. That patent addresses methods for identifying and penalizing misbehaving network flows. Carter’s prior art demonstrates TCP’s sliding window scheme for flow control, the exact type of mechanism both patents purport to cover.
In his own words, Carter said he participated out of concern for open source projects:
“As a maintainer/contributor for several open source projects (NuGetDefense being my main project), I'm always afraid some troll is going to attack one of my projects or a project I contribute to, and I may not be able to afford stopping it.”
He also noted that digging into historical research documents has its own rewards: “Honestly, the people who originally put this stuff together were often brilliant, and their work is a joy to read (even if it's a bit dry).”
Sable Voluntarily Cancels All Claims on ’932 Patent
In a separate track of the fight, Cloudflare has been pursuing Inter Partes Review (IPR) at the US Patent Office to invalidate Sable’s patents. After the Patent Office agreed to review Sable’s ’932 patent, the expected next step would have been for Sable to file a brief defending its validity. Instead, Sable voluntarily cancelled all claims of the patent, effectively ending the IPR and giving Cloudflare the full relief it sought.
The distinction matters: this patent was not merely held by Sable — it had been used to pursue settlements from Dell, Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper Networks, Aruba Networks, and others. With the claims cancelled, Sable has one less weapon in its arsenal against productive technology companies.
Coinbase Joins the Fight
Cloudflare points to a recent Coinbase blog post as a sign that its approach is gaining traction. Coinbase has announced it will refuse to capitulate to patent trolls and will instead fight back, following Cloudflare’s lead. Trolls rely on easy settlements to fund their operations, so a major company publicly committing to resistance is a meaningful development.
What’s Next
Cloudflare says it has received hundreds of prior art references on Sable’s ten patents and has used many of them in its effort to invalidate the patents asserted against it. The company encourages continued submissions, with substantial bounty funds remaining.
