Cloudflare Names Three New Project Jengo Winners as Sable Patent Case Shrinks
Cloudflare's Project Jengo has paid out over $135,000 since its launch five years ago. The program incentivizes the public to find prior art that invalidates patents held by trolls — not just those asserted against Cloudflare — aiming to reduce frivolous lawsuits against innovative companies. Today, Cloudflare announced three new winners from Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the project, each taking home $5,000 for their finds.
All three winners contributed prior art against Sable Networks, a patent troll that asserted four patents against Cloudflare in March 2021. The company has also targeted six additional Sable patents not asserted against Cloudflare.
Chapter 4: Chris Wheeler
Chris Wheeler, CTO and co-founder of Tier2 Technologies in Macon, Georgia, submitted a 1998 paper titled "A Framework for Alternate Queueing: Towards Traffic Management by PC-UNIX Based Routers" as prior art against Sable's '932 patent. That patent, filed in 2002, allegedly covers routers with aggregate flow blocks storing tunnel-specific and statistical information for selected network paths.
The paper predates the patent filing by nearly four years. It describes a PC-UNIX based router implementing a FreeBSD Alternate Queueing (ALTQ) driver with traffic management that selects network paths based on stored statistical analysis — essentially the same QoS technology the '932 patent claims. Wheeler, who holds his own patent, said he was "drawn to the idea of helping protect the integrity of the patent system."
Chapter 5: Peter S.
Peter S., a first-timer in patent law, found a MIT thesis by Rena Whei-Ming Yang that describes the solution claimed in Sable's '593 patent almost five years before Sable filed. The '593 patent concerns detecting "bad" flows; Yang's thesis studies "a means of using such mechanisms to identify nonadaptive network flows, and proposes a protocol to push this information, along with penalization responsibility, towards the flows' sources." Same concept, different terminology.
Chapter 6: David H.
David H., whose background is in accounting and finance, identified U.S. Patent No. 6,859,438, titled "Policy Based Quality of Service," as prior art against Sable's '431 patent. The '438 patent discloses the same QoS technology — a flexible, policy-based mechanism for managing, monitoring, and prioritizing network traffic — but its application dates to February 3, 1998, more than two years before the earliest possible filing date of the '431 patent's disclosure on April 19, 2000.
David expressed hope that the USPTO "adopts new technology to aid examiners in their prosecution efforts," noting that the office "continues to issue patents that are likely invalid on a number of grounds."
Patent Office and Court Continue to Shrink Sable's Case
Beyond the prior art victories, Cloudflare has been winning at the Patent Office and in court. The '932 patent was previously invalidated. Now, the U.S. Patent Office has ruled all claims from the '593 patent that Sable asserted are invalid, dropping that patent from the case entirely.
The '593 patent had 44 claims. After the Patent Office instituted inter partes review (IPR) in January 2022, Sable voluntarily canceled 17 claims. Of the remaining 27, the Patent Office found 23 invalid. The four surviving claims escaped only "by virtue of a procedural technicality" and are not part of Sable's case against Cloudflare. Coverage of the victory appeared in Bloomberg Law and Law360.
In October 2022, the Court also found nine claims from the '431 patent — one of the two remaining patents — invalid for failing statutory requirements. Sable now has only 14 claims from two patents in the case, down from the original 131 claims across four patents. Nearly 90% of the asserted claims have been canceled or invalidated.
Trial is scheduled for November 2023. Cloudflare has committed $100,000 to the prior art search and still has $50,000 to award, with submissions for Chapter 7 due by January 31, 2023.
