A Rare Jury Win Against a Patent Troll

Cloudflare has spent nearly seven years fighting patent trolls through its own legal team, external counsel, and Project Jengo, a crowdsourcing initiative that rewards people who uncover prior art that invalidates weak patents. That effort has now produced another significant victory: a jury verdict in Waco, Texas found that Cloudflare does not infringe a patent asserted by Sable IP and Sable Networks. The jury went further, ruling that Sable’s broad, decades-old patent claim was invalid—meaning the trolls can no longer assert it against anyone else.

The verdict is notable not just for what it means for Cloudflare, but because so few cases ever reach a jury. Only about 1% of civil cases go to trial; nearly all are resolved earlier through motions, delay, or settlement. In patent cases, that means millions of dollars in legal costs, which is precisely the leverage trolls rely on to extract settlements from technology companies. Most defendants find it cheaper to pay than to risk an adverse verdict and damages award. Cloudflare chose not to blink.

From 100 Claims to One

The case began in March 2021, when Sable Networks and Sable IP filed a complaint against Cloudflare in federal court, asserting roughly 100 claims across four patents. The patents, filed around the turn of the century, concerned hardware-based router technology that processed “flows” composed of multiple linked packets. That approach bears little resemblance to Cloudflare’s modern, software-defined services, which handle traffic packet-by-packet. But Sable argued its broadly worded claims covered essentially all router operations, including Cloudflare’s cloud-based architecture.

As is typical with patent trolls, Sable IP is a shell entity: it makes no products, employs no engineers, and was created in 2020 solely to monetize patents. Those patents originated with Caspian Networks, a router company that went out of business; Sable Networks acquired the assets in 2006. Sable has sued other companies—including Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, and Juniper Networks—but each of them settled out of court. Cloudflare took a different path.

Cloudflare launched a Sable-focused round of Project Jengo, offering a $100,000 prize pool for strong prior art submissions covering all of Sable’s active patents, including ones not asserted against Cloudflare. Dozens of submissions have come in, and $70,000 has been awarded since 2021; the remaining $30,000 will go to winners of the final awards, to be announced after the case concludes. Using that prior art, Cloudflare filed petitions for inter partes review with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to invalidate Sable’s patents.

The strategy worked. In May 2022, facing a petition that threatened to cancel its patent entirely, Sable voluntarily dropped all asserted claims under one patent. In January 2023, Cloudflare succeeded in invalidating portions of a second asserted patent. Then, in December 2023, the court granted summary judgment in Cloudflare’s favor on a third patent. By the time of trial, Sable’s original case—about 100 claims across four patents—had been whittled down to a single claim: claim 25 of U.S. Patent No. 7,012,919.

Trial in a Troll-Friendly Venue

Sable chose to bring its lawsuit in the Western District of Texas, specifically Waco, which has gained a reputation as a favorable venue for patent plaintiffs. Sable’s case faced steep technical hurdles, though: it had to map its flow-based hardware router technology onto Cloudflare’s packet-by-packet, software-defined network. That required equating the patent’s “line cards” with various Cloudflare software and hardware, and suggesting that any sequence of packets traversing the network qualifies as the patent’s specific “micro-flows.”

Sable’s story was a simple one: it had acquired the rights to a failed hardware company’s patents and wanted to monetize them. Cloudflare, in turn, told the jury about how it was founded to move past hardware-based solutions to cloud-based services, and how its engineers build new products today. The defense drilled into the details of Sable’s twenty-year-old patent, showing that it requires steps performed at a “line card”—hardware that does not exist in Cloudflare’s accused edge servers—and that Cloudflare designed its system for packet-by-packet inspection to combat malicious traffic. The defense also argued the patent claim was invalid: it was obvious in light of prior art from Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies, and lacked adequate written description.

In closing, Cloudflare’s trial lawyer framed the case in broader terms: the patent system exists to foster innovation, but Sable’s meritless litigation does the opposite, and only the jury could stop the abuse. After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of no infringement—and invalidity.

What Comes Next

The verdict does not end Cloudflare’s broader effort to push back against patent trolls. Following the official conclusion of the case, Cloudflare will announce the final Project Jengo awards and share further insights from taking a troll to trial. The company has also thanked Judge Alan Albright and the jury for their work, as well as the trial lawyers from Charhon Callahan Robson & Garza PLLC and The Dacus Firm.