Project Jengo’s Sable Round Concludes: Final Prize Winners Announced
With Cloudflare’s decisive courtroom victory over Sable IP and Sable Networks now firmly in the past, the company has closed the books on its second major iteration of Project Jengo, the crowdsourced prior art bounty program. The final award winners have now been selected from the pool of submissions gathered throughout the multi-year legal battle.
The conclusion follows Sable’s complete capitulation earlier this year. After a February 2024 jury trial left Sable with nothing, the troll agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, hand over a royalty-free license to its entire patent portfolio, and dedicate all of its patents to the public domain. Sable’s patents cannot now be used to fund further frivolous litigation. The case put the company out of the patent troll business entirely.
How the fight was decided
The roots of the dispute stretch back to 2006, when Sable acquired its patents from a distressed company. It took until 2021 for the troll to assert them, targeting Cloudflare, Cisco, Fortinet, Check Point, SonicWall, Juniper Networks, and a broad swath of other major tech firms. The strategy was hardly subtle: Sable wagered that weak claims would still compel settlement payments given the threat of enormous litigation costs.
Cloudflare refused that math. Instead of paying, the company litigated aggressively, nearly 100 claims across 4 patents were knocked out before trial. By the time the jury heard the case, only a single claim from the ’919 patent remained. In just 2 hours, the jury delivered a verdict that found both non-infringement and invalidity of that final claim.
Sable declined to appeal. Remarkably, the outcome also pushed the troll into paying Cloudflare $225,000 — a complete reversal of the intended shakedown.
Final winners for the Sable round
Project Jengo has served a central role in Cloudflare’s patent defense strategy. The program provides rewards to the public for uncovering prior art that invalidates the asserted patents, eliminating the ability for trolls to use flawed claims as leverage. The concept first launched in 2017 during Cloudflare’s fight against Blackbird.
Cloudflare recommitted $100,000 when Sable filed suit, with chapter-based awards announced at intervals. As the Sable case winds down, final prize awards collectively totaling $30,000 have now been distributed to standout contributors across the competition’s run.
Jean-Pierre Le Rouzic, a retired telecommunications R&D engineer from Rennes, France, won $10,000 as a final winner. A long-time Cloudflare user for his blog and a 12-time patent grantee in online authentication, Jean-Pierre produced a detailed 24-page submission against the ’431 “Micro-Flow Management” patent. His work included “two conceptual trees” built methodically from Sable’s portfolio and the asserted claims, plus a full claim chart. He said the issue “is close to my heart,” referencing the pattern of the pharma industry where IP profiteering displaces R&D.
George J., an electrical engineer and patent attorney, also received $10,000. A contributor during chapter seven who discovered the challenge on Law360, George identified three prior art references for the ’431 patent. Importantly, those references included claims overlapping with the ’919 “Micro-Flow Label Switching” patent that ultimately went to trial. His work spanned 39 pages of comparative charts.
Peter S. and Jatin each were awarded $5,000. Peter S., who holds no technical or patent background, found a thesis on the early detection of “bad” network flows, noting the work predated Sable’s ’593 patent by five years. Jatin, a computer science analyst who frequented Cloudflare’s blog, provided two strong references directly tied to Sable’s ’919 patent — the one that held up through the trial.
A warning that other trolls appear to heed
The message is not lost on others looking to pursue Cloudflare for quick settlements. Following the Sable case’s conclusion, the troll Touchpoint Projections Innovations filed suit in May 2024. Just two weeks after Cloudflare published its post on Sable’s capitulation, Touchpoint voluntarily dismissed the case with prejudice — final terms barring a refiling at any future point. Cloudflare notes the timing may be coincidental, but the progression mirrors PacSec3’s abandonment of its own claim back in 2022 once a fight became inevitable.
The project’s efficacy appears to be its legacy. Using the same bounty model that defeated Blackbird, the public has now severely degraded another troll’s leverage. Sable’s run has proven the once-profitable practice of weak claims and expensive discovery can be met with a force that threatens to neutralize a troll’s whole apparatus, not just the specific case brought forward.
