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Comment by forgotmypw3 | Hacker News Reader

>In addition to vigorously opposing this case in court, we created and sponsored Project Jengo to push back against the incentives that empower patent trolls like Blackbird Tech. Now that the case is over, we will be wrapping up Project Jengo and will report back with a summary of the Project’s successes in the near future.

I don't understand... Couldn't they expand the project to help others in a similar situation?

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I think the idea of the report back is that the knowledge of how to use such a strategy, will be widely disseminated, and that will make other victims of patent trolling more likely to fight than settle.

I didn't understand this too. It read as if they reached a settlement with Blackbird and part of that settlement involved taking down Project Jengo. From the site:

"The larger bounty (up to $30,000) will be spread among those submitting substantial prior art which reads on any of the 34 other outstanding Blackbird patents or their 3 in-flight patent applications and could lead to the invalidation of these dubious patents"

Any reason why they're wrapping this up if this hasn't yet been achieved? (those patents are still active)

The judgements seem to indicate that the patents are too broad to enforce, so anyone trolled again can just cite Cloudflare’s win. IANAL, but it looks like the patents are effectively useless, whether or not they’re valid. Invalidation is a separate process with the Patent office.

There are already a few prior art crowdsourcing tools, such as Patroll from Unified Patents and Patexia.

https://patroll.unifiedpatents.com https://www.patexia.com/contestslist

> I don't understand... Couldn't they expand the project to help others in a similar situation?

We'll have to see what they say about it.

I was originally wondering and going to ask djk44, but going back to the original Project Jengo post it was very specifically about killing Blackbird (allocating 40% of its funds to the specific '335 patent and 60% for eager invalidation of the rest of their patents library), so cloturing the project after '335 has been burned makes sense. Hopefully they'll announce a more general project / system, but we can only wait and see.

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