“Troll” loses Cloudflare lawsuit, has weaponized patent invalidated

Enlarge / Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince at a 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt conference in London. (credit: Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

A federal judge in San Francisco has unequivocally ruled against a non-practicing entity that had sued Cloudflare for patent infringement. The judicial order effectively ends the case that Blackbird-which Cloudflare had dubbed a "patent troll"-had brought against the well-known security firm and content delivery network.

"Abstract ideas are not patentable," US District Judge Vincent Chhabria wrote in a Monday order.

The case revolved around US Patent No. 6,453,335, which describes providing a "third party data channel" online. As Ars reported back when the case was filed in May 2017, the invention claims it can incorporate third-party data into an existing Internet connection "in a convenient and flexible way." Blackbird also filed a nearly identical lawsuit against the cloud platform Fastly, which was founded in 2011.

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